


Fine Lines

by Solannin



Series: Two Sides [2]
Category: Fast and the Furious Series, Hobbs & Shaw (2019)
Genre: Alpha Luke Hobbs, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Frenemies, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, M/M, Omega Deckard Shaw, Trust
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-01-07 04:27:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 21
Words: 36,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21209387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solannin/pseuds/Solannin
Summary: FollowsBetween Caveman Instincts and Idiot Lizard Hindbrains.  Hobbs and Shaw are dealing (or not) with what happened in that cabin in middle-of-nowhere Russia and where their partnership goes from there.





	1. Shaw:  Not in the Mood

Deck bit back a sigh. They'd covered the standard preliminaries before he'd even arranged the hotel: preferences, hard nos, all of that. From there things should have been nice and smooth and...system-clearing. Or something. Whatever. His idiot lizard hindbrain would get someone to fantasize about that wasn't his bloody partner.

Unfortunately it was pretty clear that the smirking alpha in front of him was just the sort of wanker that would happily stomp all over any agreement as soon as he had a chance, and Deck was not in the mood for that shite. It wouldn't even be a decent fight, at least that would be something he could appreciate, since despite the fact that the bastard was a few inches over six feet and built like a tank, he was clearly marginally less coordinated than the average toddler.

The arse swaggered forward, and Deck felt his lip curl. He'd had no particular reason to let this heat run its course, he'd just figured that he might as well since he didn't have any other plans. And because of that fantasy thing. That didn't give him any inclination to allow any of his own boundaries to be violated though, so a pathetic non-fight seemed to be the order of the day.

Deck snarled internally. Seriously, he could still feel Hobbs' breath behind his ear, and even if he'd got the impression that the man might have liked to use his teeth a little, he hadn't because Deck had said he didn't like it. Proof positive that you didn't have to have any kind of amazing mental powers to understand and respect the word 'no.'

Even if Hobbs was marginally more intelligent than Deck ever planned on admitting. And even if Deck wasn't at all certain that he wouldn't have gone back on that particular 'no' in that particular situation soon enough since a warm breath behind his ear and a little bit of nuzzling had felt damn nice and a little nip might not—no, in fact _hell no_, and fuck his obnoxious lizard hindbrain and this bloody impending heat right along with it.

Fortunately another look at the arsehole in front of him snapped him back to the present—really, despite his preening, the man's tattoos weren't even particularly well done—and Deck shook his head. “Sorry,” not that he actually was, “but I think I changed my mind.”

The man's jaw actually physically dropped. “What?”

“Changed my mind," Deck repeated. "Going to grab a drink and then head out.” Back to a second room in a completley separate hotel that he'd booked just for himself, and nore importantly to the personal affects that waited there. Among them his supply of pills because he was getting close enough to full heat that he wasn't going to bother trying to hunt down another alpha. He'd try for a more compatible, or at least less obnoxious, match next heat. The man was still staring at him, and he sighed and spoke more slowly. “I'm going to leave. I suppose I can spot you a drink at the bar, if you want.” Not that he actually owed the man anything, but he was the one calling this at the last minute. Even if he had every right it was the decent thing to do and all that shite. The wanker hadn't actually done anything besides smirk at him, after all, however much that action put Deck on edge.

“You can't do that!”

Well, he hadn't up until this point, anyway. “Watch me," Deck said dryly.

The idiot made a grab at him, and that was that.


	2. Hobbs:  Not the Night

Wanting to wring Deckard Shaw's neck wasn't really anything new. Even being on the same side didn't mean that Luke didn't still think about it occasionally, it just meant that he didn't act on those particular urges.

Wanting to wring Deckard Shaw's neck because he had a beautiful, intelligent, _interested_ woman standing in front of him and Sam off camping with her girl scout troop this weekend was new, though. Because despite what should be a promising situation for him, somehow all he could think about was that the hand on his arm didn't have calluses in the right places—didn't have calluses at all—wasn't gripping tight enough to be just shy of bruising while smirking eyes dared him to do something about it, wasn't....

Damn it.

It had been three months.

Sure, he and Shaw had had some fun back in that cabin in the middle of nowhere, had had quite a lot of fun if he was being honest about it, but it had only come about because of ridiculous biology bullshit and there hadn't been a word said about any of it since.

Of course, there hadn't been a lot of words said about anything since as far as the two of them were concerned. Aside from a milk run down in Tijuana that he hadn't bothered mentioning to Shaw until it was over and something similar in wherever the hell Espoo was that had been dealt with before Luke had even gotten the 'Just FYI' message, none of the bad guys that the two of them considered worth paying attention to had been up to anything interesting recently. Nor had there been any pings from Mr. Nobody and his lot. Aside from a couple five minute check-in type phone calls to confirm continued survival—and to exchange insults, given the parties involved—they hadn't spoken to each other, and being on two different continents pretty well ruled out any accidental run-ins.

Hell, not that he was any expert on omegas, but by now Shaw had probably already had at least one more heat and—

Something inside of him snarled abruptly at the idea of someone else with his hands on _his_ omega, and Luke squashed that thought hard. Fuck ancient caveman bullshit, Shaw wasn't 'his' anything except occasional partner, and he had every right in the world to sleep with whoever the hell he wanted to. Same as Luke was trying to do at the moment. After all, it wasn't like those couple days had magically changed his preferences, as proved by the tall, redheaded alpha he'd been chatting up since shortly after his arrival.

He realized abruptly that she was looking up at him, clearly waiting for a response to whatever she'd last said, and he smiled awkwardly as he tried to figure out what that might have been. He was coming up with nothing, though, lost in his own head as he'd been, and when her hand shifted purposefully he found himself taking a step backwards.

Her expression turned confused, and he gave another quick smile and a shake of his head as he realized that this wasn't going to work.

Well, whatever. They didn't owe each other anything, and it was early enough that she'd have no trouble finding someone else to hook up with if she wanted to. Nothing had said that he'd _had_ to go out tonight, he'd just figured that hitting one of the clubs might be fun since it was the first time he'd had a night all to himself in quite a while. Since it seemed like things weren't going to go how he'd expected, there was nothing wrong with heading home, maybe grabbing some beer and late takeout on the way, and making it a relaxing night at home. One of the guys at the gym had recommended a book the other day that had sounded worth a look.

Damn Shaw.


	3. Shaw:  Bad Ideas

“Thank you for your service,” the idiot said, and then for some ridiculous reason decided to _smile._

Deck barely refrained from going for his throat, and given how tightly Hobbs' hands were clenched he wasn't the only one. 

“Here are your rooms, and your flights will be tomorrow morning,” the idiot continued, somehow missing the danger he was in as he held out two key-cards. “Do you need any more first aid gear?”

Deck's took the keys and wondered if Hobbs was going to skip the lobby furniture and just throw the idiot. Not that he objected. The only reason that they needed any first aid gear was because that bloody truck had been imported for some damn senseless reason, and when they'd flung themselves inside through the cargo door they'd found themselves in the wrong positions and with no time to change seats. 

Deck supposed that they should be grateful that it had been a truck given Hobbs' driving skills, but his sidearm didn't have anywhere near the stopping power of Hobbs' hand cannon and he'd run through both of his remaining clips dealing with the occupants of the first half-dozen pursuit cars. And even when Hobbs had found a second to pass his revolver over, the kick meant that Deck had only been able to get off a single shot at a time before having to readjust his aim so taking out the last two pursuit cars had taken far longer than it should have. 

They'd both taken more and worse injuries in the chase than any part of the fight previous. Cuts from flying glass as the windows had shattered because even if someone had gone to the stupidity of importing a truck they hadn't bothered including anything useful like bulletproof glass, a whole hell of a lot of bruises from getting slammed against various parts of the frame due to Hobbs' absurd refusal to go around anything that he thought he could go through, and Deck had had to slap a compression bandage around one bicep where a ricocheting bullet from one of their pursuers had managed a through-and-through.

He supposed they could go to the hospital; Mr. Nobody might be an obnoxious, officious busybody, but his minions could generally manage enough of a basic cover story for that. Unless and until his injuries were proven to be something that he couldn't handle himself, though, Deck preferred not to deal with the shite that accompanied hospital visits—not least because for him hospitals always involved a cover-up and that was always a fine line to walk even without his open questions about what their pickup in Siberia might have noticed about his status—and Hobbs was generally the same way.

“Hey, princess, you waiting for someone to point you at a tower?” Hobbs asked.

Deck realized that the idiot had turned and headed for the door during his moment of introspection, and he twisted to scowl at Hobbs. “Not likely considering that you managed to take out at least one load-bearing wall of every building in this bloody city. In case no one's ever told you this, vehicles are supposed to run on the paved things _between_ the buildings.”

Hobbs scoffed, keeping pace as Deck headed further into the hotel. “Says the guy personally responsible for keeping the mailbox industry in at least a dozen countries in business.”

Deck rolled his eyes and checked the cards. One room was on the second floor and the other on the fourth, and normally he'd take the stairs—and make Hobbs take even more stairs, just on principle—but right now he just did not give a damn. Despite the adrenaline still coursing through his system he was becoming more and more aware of his injuries.

Hell, not that he was going to say so out loud, but it might not be a bad idea to have a second set of hands to stitch up the entry wound on the back of his arm. Or at least one spare hand, since now that he was looking he could see that Hobbs was holding his left arm strangely. Probably ought to sort out what had gone wrong there before the moron tried to do anything else.

Of course, Hobbs didn't have the sense to realize that, following Deck out of the elevator on the second floor and into the room around the corner, reaching out to pick at the bandage around Deck's arm as soon as the door was shut. “You need to get this stitched up, you're starting to bleed through.”

“With your one functional arm? What, did you forget you weren't in a truck anymore when you missed the doorway?” 

“My arm's fine, asshole, just whacked my funny bone on one of those last turns.” He took a seat on the bed and pulled his bag onto his lap, digging out his first aid kit. “Come on, turn around and let me take a look.”

Deck rolled his eyes and flipped him off even as he set his bag on the bed and dug out his own kit. “You need x-rays?” The chase had ended half an hour ago; if it was still bothering him a break wasn't out of the question.

Hobbs shook his head and flexed his arm. “Hurts like hell, but nothing's broken. Come on.”

Deck tossed him a cold pack anyway before turning, taking a seat on the edge of the bed and unfastening his button-up.

“What is it with you and layers?” Hobbs asked with a half-laugh, tugging on his collar.

“Believe it or not, most people don't prefer to apply their clothing with an air brush. Ready?” Yanking a bandage off a bleeding wound wasn't precisely good first aid, but it needed to be cleaned and stitched so there was no hope for it.

“Ready,” Hobbs agreed.

Deck released the compression bandage and stripped his shirts off quickly, gritting his teeth as Hobbs ran a square of disinfectant cloth over the now freely-bleeding wounds. At least the bullet had missed the bone. He pressed another bandage across the front while Hobbs stitched the back and then twisted to let him deal with the other side as well. 

Whatever Deck might say about Hobbs' intelligence, the man had managed to fasten the cold pack with a couple loose wraps of bandage across the back of his elbow so if anything actually was wrong he had a chance at keeping the swelling down. It was something, anyway.

Deck shifted back as the second set of stitches were finished, digging out a disinfectant swab of his own to deal with the various scratches and cuts left by flying glass. Nothing else serious for either of them, although Hobbs needed some help with some glass and a few stitches in the back of one shoulder. Another advertisement for tactical gear with _sleeves_ as far as Deck was concerned, even if it didn't have bullet-stopping power except across the torso.

The muscles in Hobbs' back flexed as he started to shift away, and Deck realized that he was staring at about the same instant that he caught himself licking his lips. He'd been thinking he could skip an immediate shower since the fight hadn't been that bad, but he knew as well as anyone what adrenaline could do after a fight, and—“Hey, what are you doing?”

Hobbs halted where he'd started to slide further onto the bed and stretch out. “Taking a nap.”

The matter of fact tone was more than enough to put his previous thoughts right out of Deck's mind. “Use your own bloody room!”

“This is my room.”

“Like hell it is.” Deck snatched the second key-card off the bedside table and flipped it at him. “You're up on the fourth floor.”

Hobbs smirked, catching it and flipping it back without looking at it. “Seems like that's your room to me.”

Deck's jaw worked. He didn't have the muscle mass to simply throw Hobbs off the bed, especially with only one good arm, but that didn't mean....

Hobbs flung an arm across his eyes, and Deck went for him. Hobbs only had one good arm as well, and if he didn't have the weight to put behind a real throw, he did have the speed to make the man move regardless.

Hobbs saw him coming—no surprise there since that arm had been way too casual to be anything besides a taunt—and flipped Deck past him. Deck rolled off the mattress and came to his feet on the other side, preparing for a second strike, but Hobbs had rolled with him and suddenly they were face-to-face. Or as close as the two of them ever got.

“Or you could stay,” Hobbs said after a moment of silence.

“Obviously I'm staying, it's my bloody ro—oh.” Deck had missed the change in Hobbs' tone on that last sentence for a few critical seconds, but obviously he wasn't the only one with adrenaline still pumping, and his previous thoughts returned with a vengeance.

Hobbs stepped a little closer, and with the wall right there Deck had no more room to move backwards. Not that he particularly wanted to, even if he could see that wasn't a very good idea. Hell, even if he could see that in all likelihood this was a terrible idea. Forget blockers, he wasn't even in heat at the moment, and he _never_ bothered with alphas outside of heats. And even if he happened to have what they'd need in his bag....

He found himself licking his lips again. 

Fact was he'd done plenty of stupid shite before. And he had no complaints about Hobbs' performance in bed.

None at all.

The bastard hadn't bothered spraying on another shirt, of course, which left Deck without much to grab, but he managed okay with his uninjured arm and Hobbs' uninjured shoulder. 


	4. Hobbs:  Reaching Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Okay, fixed the weird chapter numbering, and as always, thanks to everyone who reads/reviews/leaves kudos/etc.

He was so fucked. 

Well. Technically he was the one....

Anyway.

Shaw was asleep or as close as he ever got to it, half-buried underneath Luke, and since moving was a sure way to get snarled at Luke stayed where he was. Shaw would be up and disappearing soon enough.

That was part of the problem.

Actually, that was most of the problem.

It wasn't that Luke didn't enjoy what the two of them had been doing—if he didn't like it, he wouldn't do it, obviously—and Shaw wasn't what anyone would call a passive participant so he had no concerns there. But this was the fourth time that they'd wound up in bed together even without counting Russia, and if it went like the other three times it would end in the exact same way. Which was exactly the same way that their after-work activities used to end when they were just using each other as punching bags. Clean up; maybe swap a few more insults; go their separate ways until the next bad guy reared his head. No muss, no fuss, no...anything.

Luke wasn't expecting declarations of love or anything absurd like that, he was a grown man with a lifetime of experience behind him not some thirteen year old with a crush, but was an actual _conversation_ so much to ask for? Even just every now and again? The circumstances that had forced them into it over in Siberia had been hellish, and he never wanted to see Shaw going through anything like that again, but thinking back he'd actually kind of liked talking to him about something that wasn't just combat tactics prior to an engagement. There weren't a lot of people in the world who could understand men like them.

“You're thinking again,” a rough voice said from underneath him. “Trying, anyway. Apparently you're god-awful at it.”

Okay, fine. He'd like a conversation that wasn't just combat tactics and taunts. Unfortunately the latter was a good two-thirds of what came out of Shaw's mouth in general, and even when Luke didn't intend it that way, that was how Shaw tended to interpret almost everything he said as well. Two of their four times together had started with thrown punches that shifted direction shortly thereafter; it would be no surprise if they went the other way one of these days. It would be more of a surprise if it didn't. 

“Were you always this much of a jackass?” he had to ask.

Shaw flexed his shoulders, and Luke quickly rolled away before he decided to aim his elbows anywhere sensitive and make that day today. As Luke had expected, Shaw was up off the bed as soon as Luke was clear, snagging a set of clean clothes out of his bag and heading for the bathroom, and Luke sighed. Upon reflection that question hadn't done much to diffuse the situation, and between the two of them that conversation he'd like was about a million times less likely than that fight.

Luke did a quick clean-up and then took his turn in the bathroom after Shaw, fully expecting the man to be gone by the time he got out. For once he'd stuck around, though, sitting against the head of the bed fiddling with one of his guns, and after a minute of hesitation Luke gestured towards the door. “Want to grab some breakfast?” His flight wasn't until close to noon, he didn't think Shaw's was any earlier, and however they sometimes acted towards each other, they both had to eat. Actually the early hour probably explained why Shaw was still here, now that Luke thought about it. 

Shaw looked up, forehead creasing. “What?”

“Breakfast,” Luke repeated. “It's a meal commonly consumed by humans at the beginning of the day. There's got to be some place open.” It was early, but not _that_ early. And it wasn't a totally random invitation...they'd shared meals before when schedules dictated it, even if they'd tended to ignore each other beyond the occasional 'pass the pepper' comment in the past which wasn't quite what he wanted today. 

Shaw continued to stare at him for a long minute and then tucked his gun away and pushed himself to his feet, pulling the strap of his bag up over his shoulder with a frown. “Okay.”


	5. Shaw: Confusion

Normally when Deck cracked a joke about Hobbs taking too many blows to the head it was just that, but right now he was seriously starting to wonder.

Oh, Deck had no objections to what had become an odd sort of post-mission friends-with-benefits arrangement between them. 'Odd' because they weren't precisely friends, but whatever; not only was Hobbs damn good in bed, he'd also never once treated Deck as anything other than the professional that he was despite his status. It wasn't a situation that Deck was accustomed to finding himself in where alphas were concerned, at least not once they knew what he was. Maybe that was just reflective of the sorts of alphas he'd had to deal with over the years to keep his cover-up going, but given what he'd run into back in school and then during his short stint on the docks he wasn't so sure.

If forced—at gunpoint, after suffering a head injury of his own, probably significant blood loss to go with it, etcetera—Deck might even admit that he didn't find it completely unpleasant to sleep half-buried underneath Hobbs. At least when the man wasn't trying to solve world hunger or whatever the fuck it was that he occasionally thought about that made him tense up and twitch and interrupt Deck's comfortable rest. He was warm and solid and not the sort to take the kind of liberties that would require that Deck slit his throat which mean that Deck could actually relax for a bit. Besides which, they only ended up in that particular position after activities that left Deck disinclined to do much immediate moving about anyway.

Hell, if nothing else, if someone ever burst in shooting, his presence as a bullet stop would give Deck an extra second or two to grab his sidearm.

But none of that was _this_.

Deck eyed the light coming out from under the door of the occupied bath and once again debated taking off because he had no bloody clue what this was.

It wasn't that they'd never spent any time together outside of ops before. Those days in Siberia hadn't been the first time they'd run into a transportation delay on the end of a mission, and on more than one occasion they'd had to spend some time on stakeout going into one as well. Hobbs was still too bloody obvious for Deck to be entirely comfortable with him on any kind of actual undercover job, but whatever. Even that wasn't a big deal. They dealt with it.

But that wasn't this either. This was Hobbs deciding that they should bloody eat together and chat and...well, whatever it was he was after. Deck had no idea, but this was the third time that he'd suggested that they grab a meal or a drink before they had to catch their respective flights and since that was the sort of thing they'd generally handled on their own previously, there had to be something behind it. The first time it had happened Deck had gone along with it mostly because he'd had no reason not to, the second he'd attempted to decline but there genuinely had been only been one tinly pub in that nothing airport and only a few barstools left available inside, and this time....

This time he still wasn't sure. 

Part of Deck said that he needed to figure out what Hobbs was on about. Last time he'd given up on subtlty and tried asking outright on that barstool in the middle of nowhere, but Hobbs had somehow turned it into a question about his car collection that had given him no clues whatsoever, and then Hobbs' plane had come before he could press further.

His initial thought had been that Hobbs had decided to go after his not-so-recently escaped mother and was somehow trying to pump him for information, but he'd discarded that idea almost immediately. Hobbs wasn't going to waste his time on a seventy-two year old con artist unless she got up to something far nastier than scamming some idiot investment banker out of a few baubles. Anyway, as last Deck had heard, her latest mark was so oblivious that he'd named a yacht after her and taken her off to cruise the Aegean with him.

The suspicion that Hobbs might have learned of _Owen's_ escape and decided to do something about it was far more concerning because the sorts of nastiness his little brother enjoyed were absolutely the kinds of thing that would pop up on Hobbs' radar. So far even Deck's sources had been quiet there, though, and he had a far better idea of what to look for. And he doubted that Hobbs would be stupid enough to try to pump him for information on Owen anyway. Deck might have spent half his life annoyed at the little shite for one reason or another, but that didn't mean he'd let anyone else mess with him whatever the personal toll it took. And Hobbs was well aware of that fact.

Besides, pumping Deck for information didn't require any of the talking about his daughter's football games—although the bastard insisted on calling it soccer and claimed that he coached, off all the absurd statements that Deck had ever heard him make—or his sister's work at a local women's shelter or where Jonah's latest project car would be going after he finished with it or any of that that he'd been doing. 

Maybe Hobbs was looking for information about Hattie? It wasn't an idea that Deck had considered before, and it seemed more than a little twisted under the circumstances, but hell, what did he know? Hobbs had never specifically mentioned her, but she was the only member of his family that Deck _could_ talk about freely at this point, and they had slept together at least once. And even Deck would acknowledge that Hobbs had done right by her after everything that had happened with Eteon, forcing MI6 to play nice through his CIA connections and all of that. 

Still, the timing seemed weird for something along those lines, and if that was what he was after he was going to be disappointed. Deck had never known Hattie to be interested in other alphas beyond a bit of fun every now and again. He couldn't even remember the last time Hobbs had got a mention in one of their chats. 

Something that almost felt like relief flashed through him at that, but of course it did. Obviously his baby sister could do better than the she-Hulk in there.

The water shut off and Hobbs appeared a moment later, fixing another shirt that looked like it would barely even be comfortable on Deck, and Deck gave a mental scoff. Forget head injuries, the man's clothing was probably just perpetually cutting off circulation to his brain. 

“You ready to go?” Hobbs asked before Deck could do more than open his mouth to voice the thought, swinging his bag up onto his shoulder.

Deck stood and grabbed his own bag. It was too late to disappear now so he might as well give figuring out what the hell was going on in Hobbs' head one more try. “Last I looked I wasn't the one with the baby oil routine.”

Hobbs rolled his eyes.


	6. Hobbs:  Favors I

“_No,_ Luke,” Lisa said firmly. “You saw the order. Omegas only.”

That order was a steaming pile of utter horseshit as far as Luke was concerned, and he knew that she agreed, but while he'd be perfectly happy to violate it and deal with the consequences as they came, she was insistent that they needed to do this the 'right' way. And not just for the sake of meeting the conditions on this particular writ, either. He'd hoped to convince her otherwise, but so far it wasn't going well.

He'd never had much to do with local law enforcement or the city court system or any of that personally, but she crossed paths with them on a fairly regular basis as part of her work at the shelter, and from what she'd told him some of the rulings coming out lately had been worrying. Like this one. Especially this one. The background involved wasn't, unfortunately, all that out of the ordinary for the cases she saw: a male alpha with a nasty temper had gotten violent with his live-in girlfriend, a female omega. Very probably not for the first time, but when he'd broken her wrist she'd finally fled. 

With the assistance of the shelter's legal counsel—in other words Lisa's long-time boyfriend David—the woman been able to get a restraining order and a writ to allow her to go back to his apartment to collect her belongings without his interference, but this one was unusually specific about who was permitted to accompany her to the point where almost anyone that Lisa would have sent previously was excluded.

No alphas...Luke had always thought that orders like that were crap, not least because it ruled him out as one of the escorts even when he was in town, but it had appeared every now and again over the years. Generally when the person on the other side of the table had money and connections and some slick-tongued lawyer making the bullshit argument that it was just having another alpha on their property that had 'set them off' and they couldn't possibly tolerate such a thing in their dwelling even for an hour if they weren't allowed to be there. 

The first time Luke had heard it he'd actually suggested that David drop the restraining order and he'd be happy to meet whatever asshole alpha was involved on whatever terms they liked, but unfortunately that wasn't the sort of thing that the courts supported. Which he, as a well-educated man in the twenty-first century, understood perfectly well, but occasionally there were days when he thought those cavemen ancestors of his might have had a good point when it came to certain things.

And in this case the order didn't just say no alphas, it also said no betas. He'd never seen that before, and it went well beyond crap and into the completely absurd. By their very nature betas registered as null. There was no argument to be made to exclude them.

Lisa felt the same, and according to what David had said at dinner last night the situation was potentially even worse than someone with money and connections buying favors because the creep in this case had had only had his pro-bono defense lawyer at the hearing and he hadn't made any arguments at all. That was what David had expected since the man was probably trying for a plea bargin, and anyway they were talking about an apartment building with shared ventilation and people of all sorts in and out at all hours of the day, but how that wording had gotten in if a lawyer hadn't asked for it...if that sort of thing became standard language things had the potential to get ugly. Uglier than these situations already were.

Well, that was what David was looking into at the moment. Luke was more concerned about Lisa's insistence that this be done completely legally and therefore her overprotective little brother would _not_ be coming along even though she'd already volunteered to accompany the woman herself. And never mind the red flags that said he absolutely should because also per David the man had all but announced in court that he'd go to his apartment whenever he wanted. Lisa had had plenty of self-defense classes at this point, but her instinctive reaction in bad situations was still to freeze, and even if she'd gotten better at recognizing that it always took her a few critical seconds to push past it. Luke had hoped to convince her that he could just 'happen' to be in the area and if things went pear-shaped he'd deal with it and call on whoever he needed to at the DSS to have his back in the aftermath, but so far the conversation wasn't going like he'd have preferred. And without her assistance he wasn't getting the address or the time of the pickup because it had been redacted in the court records and there was no chance that David would ever go behind her back. Even if he might want to.

Usually that was one of the things that Luke appreciated about the man.

"Your word that you'll stay out of this," Lisa said, crossing her arms over her chest and glaring at him. 

Luke gritted his teeth. She was his big sister, and he was going to end up agreeing even if he didn't like it, but not only were most of her regular volunteers excluded by the nature of the order, so were the majority of the police officers—off duty, in plainclothes—she'd normally ask to come along if a situation was questionable. Maybe even all of them. Luke had no idea what the makeup of the various departments was, but he didn't see it as a common career for omegas. "Lise, maybe you could—" He stopped abruptly, feeling his lips twitch as the obvious occurred to him. “You know, I might know someone.”

"Omegas only, Luke,” Lisa repeated. “Your friends from work aren't going to be of much use here.”

“Hey, give me a little credit,” Luke said. “I know more than just meathead alphas.” The odds of a creep like this getting past Shaw...well, there weren't odds for that; if the guy decided to make trouble he wouldn't even see Shaw coming unless Shaw decided to make a point. Unfortunately even if Shaw would be happy enough to beat the shit out of some asshole, and that wasn't the kind of thing Luke needed to question, he might not be willing to do what was required to meet the qualifications of that damn writ. And Luke couldn't exactly blame him, not when he'd spent twenty-some years covering up what he was.

It would make things a hell of a lot easier, though. And Shaw could always just invent himself a new identity to avoid having 'omega' linked to his name if he didn't want it. Luke wasn't the computer expert, but it wasn't like Shaw hadn't done that sort of thing plenty of times in the past. Whether he'd be willing to do _Luke_ that kind of favor, though, Luke had no idea.

He checked his watch. It was late, London time, but not ridiculously so. “Let me make a call, okay?”


	7. Lisa: Favors II (Interlude)

“Luke Hobbs, have you completely lost your mind?” Lisa demanded, hands on her hips. “You’re talking about someone who tried to _kill_ you!” 

“Just the once,” he protested.

“Oh, just the once, I see. That makes it so much better.” She loved her little brother, but he had the self-preservation instincts of a lemming.

“Come on, Lise—”

“Do not ‘Come on, Lise,’ me,” she snapped. Anytime Luke found himself trying to use that phrase, he should really just _not._ “He blew you out a fourth-story window! Do you know how lucky you are to have survived?”

“I landed on an SUV!”

“Right, exactly as he was aiming for, because it’s a vehicle so well known for its cushioning properties.” How was this her life?

“Well, he did help me save the world,” Luke said. “Twice, actually. I mean, the first time he was kind of playing dead for a good part of it, but—”

“I don’t care!” she snapped. “He tried to kill you! What part of this are you having trouble comprehending?”

“It was just the once,” Luke repeated. “And he was handy to have around on Samoa.”

“After he got you labelled an international terrorist, so you’ll forgive me if I don’t jump for joy at that recommendation.” Lisa crossed her arms over her chest. “Does Jonah know what he did to you? Does Mama?”

“He got along with them just fine,” Luke returned. “And the international terrorist thing wasn’t his fault; he got caught up in that bullshit right along with me.”

As if that attempt to distract her was going to fly. “I asked if they knew what he tried to do.” Because she knew her all of her little brothers, and no matter how utterly furious Jonah had been with Luke, there was no way in hell he’d tolerate someone who tried to hurt him. And Mama could make Jonah look like a puppy when she was having a bad day.

“It wasn’t really relevant at the time.”

“So that’s a ‘no.’”

“Lisa, I get it.” He held up his hands. “I do. I swear. And if I had an alternative for you, I wouldn’t even have suggested it. But you want to do this by the book, which means you can’t take me or David or any of your usual volunteers, and if this guy decides to make trouble….” He shrugged slightly. “I’m just afraid that it’s not going to end well.”

She wanted to be angry at him, but unfortunately, he wasn’t wrong. Chloe was already terrified about the situation to the point where it was all Lisa could to do to keep her cognizant of the fact that going back to him wouldn’t magically make him change or make him a better person—and that not going to the apartment meant never getting any of her things back, assuming there were any still available to recover—and although Mylie and Tyler had both taken the same self-defense classes that Lisa had, they weren’t even proficient to her level. And she was no expert. If this jackass showed up looking to make trouble, all of them would be at a serious disadvantage.

And that was if it was just the one jackass and not him and one or more of his ‘friends’ that might possibly have some kind of pull at the courthouse because David still hadn't been able to pin that nastiness down. 

“Shaw’s a one-man army,” Luke continued. “It would take another professional to even see him coming, and there aren’t a dozen people on the planet good enough to beat him in a fight. If you won’t take me along, then I’m asking you, please, take him. I mean, he’s already flying in. If nothing happens then he’s just another set of hands to haul boxes and you can make fun of me for being paranoid later.”

“And what makes you think he’s somehow going to be able to get around the wording of that writ? It doesn’t specify only American alphas or anything as loophole-happy as that.”

“That’s why he’s the only alternative I’ve got for you. He meets the qualifications of the order.”

Lisa stared. “You’re telling me that the guy who fought you to a standstill and then blew you out a fourth story window was—is—an omega?”

“Well, it wasn’t a standstill," Luke objected, "I had him on the ropes until he pulled out that damn explosive. But in the end it took dropping a building on him to stop him, and even that was more a speed bump than a stop. Vicious little bastard, let me tell you.”

“That’s….” She had no idea what that was. Omegas weren’t fighters at all, never mind in the top twelve on the planet, but that wasn’t the kind of thing that her brother got wrong. Hell, he sounded downright impressed with this Shaw. “You’re sure?”

“That he can fight or that he’s an omega?” One shoulder twitched. “Guess it doesn’t matter since the answer is yes to both, although I didn’t know until a few months ago about the omega part since he’s been taking blockers since he first joined the military.”

“If you just found out a few months ago, that means that you’ve worked with him since the mess on Samoa,” she said, not bothering to try to hide her anger. Her brother had depressed _idiot_ lemming instincts, apparently.

“You know I can’t talk about work,” he objected.

“I _know_ that you officially retired two years ago although your daughter still keeps mysteriously needing to use her room at my house every six or eight weeks,” Lisa shot back.

Luke opened his mouth and then shut it again for a moment before replying. “Let’s just say that I don’t consider him being a vicious bastard to be a negative when it’s directed at the bad guys. Will you at least meet him? He’s already on the plane on his way.”


	8. Shaw: Favors III

The flight attendant squawked the usual spiel about bags shifting during flight, and Deck ignored him as he popped open the overhead and retrieved his bag. Idiots who couldn’t figure out that things had shifted after a landing like that deserved to get cracked in the skull.

His skin crawled a little as joined the queue to deplane, a reminder that he hadn’t taken any blockers today even if he still had a few hours left before the omega markers became anything resembling detectable, and he told old reflexes to belt up. In a city of a million people—hell, a couple times that here if he remembered correctly—where he was just one face in the crowd, it didn’t matter what markers he had. It didn’t matter _anywhere_, anymore now that he’d left the military and MI-6; he ran his own life, picked his own jobs, all of that. And if someone had a problem with what he was they could go to hell.

Or that was how it should work, anyway. He’d been on this planet too long to be quite so sanguine about the whole thing.

He let the crowd carry him through customs and then exited out into the airport proper where it only took him a few minutes to locate Hobbs. Mostly because Hobbs did not blend into the crowd, taking up an inconvenient amount of space in the already-busy international terminal as he did.

“Finally,” Hobbs greeted with a grin as Deck reached him. “Did you get lost trying to find your way off the plane or were you just too short to see the overhead signs?”

“Was the weirdest thing, everybody queued up and exited the plane politely and in order and such. Not a single oversized gorilla trying to bust through the sheet metal.”

“That was once, and excuse me for not wanting to be in an aluminum tube while it’s _burning_. Next time I’ll just leave you to your barbecue.”

Deck rolled his eyes. He’d done the sensible thing and kicked out the emergency exit instead of trying to break into the cargo hold. The job had been to destroy the weapons; as far as he was concerned fire bloody qualified.

“Do you have any luggage to pick up?” Hobbs asked.

“Nah, everything’s in here.” He tugged at the strap of the bag looped over his shoulder. It wasn’t much, a few changes of clothes and a couple weapons of the sort that were easy to smuggle onboard a commercial airline, but he didn’t expect to be here that long or need much beyond his fists. And if he did…well, heavier weaponry was something that he knew he could get from Hobbs. “When are we doing this?”

“Saturday, although I haven’t gotten the exact time from Lisa yet. I think her plan was for all of you to take the van over there together, but I don’t know where ‘there’ is yet either since I’m not invited.” A fact that annoyed him to no end if his expression was anything to go by, but he didn’t say anything further as he turned and began to make his way through the crowd. Or he started moving and the crowd parted around him, anyway. Deck just shook his head and took advantage of the space.

“Kind of surprised that you wouldn’t just ignore this order and go yourself regardless,” Deck said as they reached a slightly more open area.

“I would if Lisa would let me.”

“Ah.” That made more sense than him deciding to respect an idiot court order.

“Thanks for coming,” Hobbs said quietly before Deck could comment on his sister’s obvious intelligence, checking the road quickly before crossing into the parking area. “We’ll go over to Lisa and David’s tonight and they can go over everything in detail, but like I told you on the phone, this whole situation stinks.”

“You're not going to get an argument from me.” It was one thing to exclude a specific alpha from a potentially volatile situation, but from what Hobbs had told him this stupidity not only excluded all alphas, up to and including any friends or relatives that this woman might have wanted with her, it somehow managed to exclude betas as well. Which was nonsense. Unless, of course, someone wanted the situation to get ugly and were deliberately putting this woman and any other omegas who were with her at a disadvantage.

His lips twitched a little. If someone wanted ugly, he’d be happy to oblige.

A truck beeped ahead of them, lights flashing as it unlocked, and Deck tossed his bag into the back and then opened the passenger door before pausing. “Do you think you can manage to avoid buildings in this tank, or do you want me to drive?”

“Not all of us buy our cars in the toy section,” Hobbs returned, “and you won’t be able to reach the pedals.”

Deck flipped him off on principle and swung in, pulling the belt across as Hobbs did the same.

“I've got a room set up for you at my place unless you’d rather stay elsewhere,” Hobbs said. “Lisa and David are both still at work, but I figure we can drop your stuff off and you can grab a nap if you want it before we need to head over. Sam’s going to her friend’s house for dinner after school so it should be quiet.”

“A nap wouldn’t hurt,” Deck admitted, although quiet or lack thereof had long since ceased to matter to him. Usually he’d try to get in some sleep on the plane when he was dropping time like this, but today that hadn’t happened, and he wanted to be fully alert when it came to learning the details of this mess. And if Hobbs said he had a room, he meant a room, not that he was expecting…well. Deck hadn’t expected that anyway. Not from him. And not that Deck would object to that sort of activity at some point during this visit—provided Hobbs’ daughter was well out of the way, anyway, obviously—but not right now.

Hobbs’ home wasn’t what he’d expected, with its wood and light and plants tucked off down a quiet street, but then again there was a pair of surfboards, one bright pink, in the garage, rollerblades beside the kitchen island, and plenty of other indications that there was a little girl living here too. Hobbs left him in a nicely appointed bedroom with the bed neatly made up and a stack of towels on the dresser, saying something about going to the gym, and then he was gone before Deck could make an appropriately snarky reply. Which was a pretty good indication that he did need some sleep.

Deck woke up to the sound of movement in a nearby room a few hours later and after a quick shower went to find Hobbs in the kitchen. “Get kicked out for tipping their weight machine over again?” he greeted.

Hobbs flung a chunk of carrot at him. “Only pipsqueaks like you use weight machines.”

Deck had caught the carrot on reflex and with a quick shrug tossed it in his mouth. “So are you planning on your fifth meal of the day with your sister, or what? Because that pile doesn't look like a snack to me.” Not even for Hobbs, who really did plow through more calories than Deck could manage in three times as long.

“Change of plans. I know Lisa's mentioned having issues with her oven once or twice before, but apparently when she got home and turned it on to preheat it it started to smoke. So that’s been disconnected, and she and David are bringing the chickens over here instead. You could be useful and chop something.”

“Better than ending up with half your thumb in dinner when you miss,” Deck acknowledged, catching the kitchen knife Hobbs tossed to him and coming around to see what needed chopping. Not that Hobbs was a bad cook, as it happened, at least if you overlooked his disgusting habit of drinking eggs, but that wasn’t the kind of thing Deck was likely to admit out loud. Hobbs gave him a sideways look as he came alongside, and he sighed. “Starting to show?”

“Yeah,” Hobbs admitted, shouldering into him lightly. “Sorry.”

“Is what it is.” It wasn't that he objected to being an omega, he never had even back when he was a kid, it was just the occasional bullshite responses to it that left him feeling somewhat murderous. Sometimes more than somewhat. At least it wasn't coming as a surprise where Hobbs was concerned this time, though, and in this case he actually needed the blockers to wear off to be of any use. “Courgettes too?” he checked, indicating the ones that had been set off to the side.

“What the hell is a—that’s a zucchini. What is wrong with you?”

Deck shook his head and set to chopping. “Bloody American doesn’t even know what he’s cooking.”

Hobbs arranged the vegetables in a roasting pan as Deck finished them, and then it was just a matter of waiting for the main dish to arrive, and they both ended up at the kitchen table with beers.

“So I know Lisa is your sister, but who's this David person?” Deck asked. “Her husband?”

“Boyfriend, although they've been together almost as long as Sam's been alive. He's actually a lawyer at one of the firms downtown, but he does most of his pro bono work at the shelter and is the one trying to figure out who's behind this stupidity on the court side of things.”

That made sense; time spent in federal prison notwithstanding Deck didn't actually know much about the American justice system, but if some arsehole clerk-type had been the one to sneak that shite into the order they probably wouldn't make it obvious by stopping by to introduce themselves. Unless they were friends of the first arsehole, anyway, in which case Deck would be just as happy to meet them as him.

Hobbs opened his mouth to say something when the doorbell rang and then there was the sound of a door opening, and, “Luke, it's us.”

“In here, Lisa,” Hobbs called back, setting his beer down and pushing himself to his feet. “Shaw finally woke up, and the oven and the vegetables are ready for you.”

The woman who came around the corner clearly took after her mother and the oldest of the Hobbs brothers in build, far shorter and less solid than Hobbs and with softer features. The man behind her was considerably taller, albeit on the weedy side, and given the suit he must have come straight here from work. He nodded politely as Deck came to his feet as well and introductions began, but his expression was the only vaguely welcoming one in the pair because if looks could kill, Hobbs—Lisa—would have had him spitted before Hobbs—Luke—finished his name.

Shite. He probably should have expected that, now that he thought about it. Not that Hobbs—Luke, again—shouldn't have bloody warned him, but he wasn't generally on good terms with people who tried to blow up his little siblings either.

Hobbs—Lisa, this time, and damn but that was going to get annoying—ground out a greeting, and he managed a polite return even as he was suddenly glad that he'd grabbed his jacket out of habit. It was deceptively light, but there were panels in the front _and_ back capable of turning a knife.


	9. Luke: Favors IV

You do realize that it's like ninety-five degrees out, right?” Luke had to ask, stepping away from his truck and out onto the boardwalk. The sunny boardwalk, with its usual weekday mid-morning crowd, half of whom weren't even sporting shirts. In definite contrast with the man beside him.

“You do realize that I have to worry about both your sister and your kid taking potshots at me, right?” Shaw sniped back. “I mean, you couldn't have warned me? I've been in games of bloody Russian roulette that were more relaxing.”

“Sam isn't—Lisa wouldn't—” Luke gave up and just groaned. “Has anyone ever told you that you're paranoid?”

“I'm alive, aren't I? Just wait, one of 'em is going to be popping up any minute now.”

Luke gave the boardwalk another once over and was completely unsurprised at the lack of attackers appearing from anywhere. “Lisa is at work,” he said with exaggerated patience. “Just like she always is at ten-thirty am on Fridays. Sam is at school. Just like _she_ always is at ten-thirty am on Fridays. And since neither of them is planning to kill you, a bulletproof jacket seems like just a little much.”

Shaw scoffed, and Luke rolled his eyes Okay, yeah, Lisa had been talking through gritted teeth the few times she'd spoken directly to Shaw last night, and...well, Sam was ten. He should have spent a little more time explaining why the man who'd put him in the hospital a couple years ago was now staying in their guest room. But Shaw was being absurd about the whole thing.

Luke looked over at him and sighed. “Seriously, no one is popping up from anywhere, and you're making me sweat just looking at you.”

“Mm?” Shaw smirked. “Now, see, that sounds like a personal problem.”

Luke couldn't help choking a little at his tone. “You're an asshole, you know that?” A fact that had a great deal to do with why they were headed for the gym, actually, but it still bore saying. Shaw had stayed out of the way while Luke had been getting Sam's breakfast ready and her off to school this morning, but he'd come out when her bus had pulled away and the two of them had been picking at each other ever since. Luke had a weight bench and a hanging bag at his place, but there was no good place to spar except the backyard, and considering what he and Shaw could do...well, one of them getting kicked through a privacy fence would raise a lot more questions than he felt like answering when it came to the neighbors.

Gerry's setup wasn't actually all that much better for all that it was obviously larger than the half of a two-car garage that also played home to Luke's motorcycle. The place had been a boxing gym back in the day, but most of his current patrons preferred the same sorts of workouts that Luke did and his equipment reflected that. There was, however, a recessed area at the rear where he'd left the floor layered with sparring mats, and if a couple of his patrons wanted to claim that they were sparring when they were trying to beat the shit out of each other over, he didn't consider it his business. Unless things started getting bloody, anyway, at which point he had no problem tossing them out on their ears. Or getting his son to do so, anyway.

Gerry's also wasn't the kind of place where you brought a friend along at random, but considering that it was a weekday morning and the place was all but deserted he didn't do more than grunt when Luke stuck his head in the office and told him that he and a friend would be using the mat at the back. Then again, Luke had helped Kyle toss a few of those idiots out so he probably trusted him not to be stupid about things.

Shaw had gone ahead to the back at Luke's vague wave upon entering, and he shook his head as Luke came down the couple stairs into the recessed area to join him. “You do realize that it was damn stupid to bring me to an alpha gym like this, don't you?” he said quietly.

“Huh?”

“You can tell that I'm an omega now, right?”

“Yeah, sure.” Luke kind of liked it, not that he'd ever say so out loud. After all, he planned on surviving this visit too, and unlike Lisa or Sam Shaw was perfectly capable of killing. And for a lot less than a comment like that. “

"Then so can everyone else, and you don't get a lot of alphas happy to see someone like me in a place like this.”

“Okay, now you're just being ridiculous. No one cares. Especially since there are only like three guys here aside from us.”

“You're an idiot,” Shaw said with a sigh. And then tossed his bag aside and attacked.

Luke didn't try to snag Shaw's jacket as he twisted and let Shaw's lunge carry him past; he'd seen Shaw wrap too many guys up like birthday gifts to take obvious bait like that. He did follow the lunge, though, trying to get—and keep—Shaw on the ground where the weight differential gave Luke a serious advantage. Shaw knew better than to let himself be pinned, though, and his reflexes had him back on his feet and dancing away before Luke could capitalize. Shedding his jacket and tossing it aside as he did so, the bastard.

“Should have let me loan you one of Sam's t-shirts,” Luke taunted. “You'd probably be more comfortable.”

“Well, I mean, I'd feel bad going through her wardrobe like that since that's obviously what you do on a regular basis.”

Luke judged the distance to the cinder blocks behind Shaw and then closed rapidly. Shaw was faster, but Luke could soak up a lot more punches, and if he could get Shaw up against the wall quickly enough....

Somehow Shaw managed to use the wall to kick himself up and sideways, though, sending him shooting past Luke in a gymnastics maneuver that Luke couldn't have matched if he'd tried, and then the fight was on. At least down here on the mats Shaw couldn't keep coming up with random objects to throw at him the way he did when they got into a fight in a hotel room or safehouse or wherever. Small mercies, since the increased maneuvering room over those spaces was more of an advantage for him than for Luke.

Luke wasn't sure how long they'd been going, certainly long enough for both of them to build up a sweat but nowhere near when either would ever call a halt, when Shaw's eyes abruptly narrowed on something past Luke's shoulder and he stopped bracing against Luke's grip. It wasn't the sort of trick they used when they were sparring with each other, and Luke immediately released him and ducked to the side to let Shaw at whoever had gotten his attention.

Unfortunately who'd gotten his attention was Gerry, and Shaw wasn't nice when it came to joint-locks.

“Shaw, let him go!” Luke said before Shaw could do anything permanent. Gerry was older than he looked.

Shaw might have relaxed his grip a little at Luke's words, it was hard to say, but from his expression he obviously had no plans to release the man entirely just yet.

“Seriously,” Luke said. “This is his gym.”

“His gym, and he's stupid enough to try to sneak up on two trained fighters?” Shaw snorted and then released Gerry at the same time he launched him away. It was a safety measure as much as anything else, giving him time to reset in case Gerry spun and attacked again, but in this case Gerry stumbled and would have landed on his face if Luke hadn't sprung to catch him.

Gerry pushed himself away from Luke, turning back to Shaw with wide eyes. “What the hell are you?”

“Aside from a trained special forces operative?” Luke asked before Shaw could answer that question. “Seriously Gerry, what were you thinking getting in close like that without shouting out a warning? You're lucky it was him and not me because I wouldn't have locked you up I'd have put you out.” And he really wouldn't have wanted to call Kyle and tell him he'd put the man's 70-some year old father in the hospital.

“I thought he might need...help,” Gerry said faintly, wincing and then cradling his arm.

Shaw didn't even have to move for Gerry to pale even further at admitting that, and Luke shook his head. Gerry's story was no secret, he'd gotten into the military at the tail end of Vietnam and then stayed in through Desert Storm the first time around before giving in to the urging of his family and moving back here to take over his uncle's old gym, but he'd never been the kind of soldier who'd have crossed paths with a person like Shaw.

“'He' doesn't,” Shaw all but snarled. “In fact, when it comes to injury count, 'he' is well ahead of Hobbs in the rankings.”

Luke sighed and pushed aside his immediate inclination to protest Shaw's assessment. Not that the protest wasn't deserved, it just wasn't the time for it. “Gerry Thomas, Deckard Shaw. Who's in town to do a favor for me and my sister, so can you not piss him off any more, please.”

“But omegas can't fight,” Gerry protested.

“Says who? You?”

Gerry's color returned abruptly as he flushed at the derision in Shaw's voice, and Luke cut him off before he could say anything.

“Seriously, Gerry, don't. On your best day—hell, your best and his worst—you'd be swinging at empty air until he decided he was done playing with you.”

“Damn it, Hobbs, I told you you were an idiot for bringing me here,” Shaw said, snagging his jacket from the ground.

“Would you not?” Luke asked. “We needed a sparring ring and this was a good one.” At least up until stupidity had happened, anyway.

“And if I accidentally killed the owner of the gym for being a dumbarse? Great plan.”

Luke rolled his eyes. “It was just a mistake. You're okay, right?” he checked, looking at Gerry. 

Gerry shook his head and then nodded quickly. “I...yeah, sure, I'll be fine. Nothing got dislocated or whatever. I'm just old fashioned, I guess.” Another headshake and he took a step backwards. “Sorry to have bothered you.” He started to turn and then paused. “I might not be the only old-fashioned one around, though, especially when people start getting out of work.”

Shaw looked like he was about to say 'I told you so,' again, and this time Luke was the one who shook his head. “It's fine. I think we'll be finishing up soon anyway.”

Gerry nodded and headed back up the steps, still throwing backwards looks over his shoulder every few steps .

Well, _shit_. “All right, all right,” Luke said, holding up his hands when they were finally alone again. “You're right, I did not see that coming.” He had absolutely no idea how anyone could watch Shaw for more than two seconds and come to the conclusion that he wasn't a fighter,especially if both of those seconds had involved the punches they'd just been trading, but apparently it was possible.

Shaw shrugged. “At least we got a good hour and some in. And it's proof it'll be good cover tomorrow, if nothing else.” He snorted. “Fact is, they probably wouldn't have been happy to see me here even if I was passing as a beta, although no one would have been as likely to try and 'help' in that case.”

Luke didn't much like the idea that the guys at a gym he liked would be jackasses to that extent, but under the circumstances he wasn't sure that he could argue the point. “Want to clean up and go grab some lunch?” he suggested instead.

“Depends. What are the odds of Hobbs—either your sister or your kid, in this case—waiting outside with a sniper rifle?”

“Oh, for—” Luke threw up his hands and swiveled to grab his bag. “Come on, showers are this way.”

Neither Lisa nor Sam were there to greet them with any random weapons when they headed back out to the boardwalk, to Luke's absolute lack of surprise, but he kept his reaction to a pointed glance. There were a couple good seafood stands nearby, and with a quick check that Shaw was okay with that for lunch he headed for the nearest.

“So I've got to ask, why would you play more than one game of Russian roulette?” Luke asked as they walked. “Or why would you play _even_ one game of Russian roulette?”

Shaw shrugged. “When it comes to finding Russian mobsters, sometimes it's easier to let them find you.”

That almost made sense. At least when he considered that he was talking to Shaw. They paused to get food, handed over in cardboard baskets, and then it only took a few minutes to find seats in the sand. And Shaw finally shoved that damn jacket in his bag, which Luke considered a win. “Why would you want to find Russian mobsters?” he asked curiously as he started on his lunch. “Doesn't sound much like an MI-6 thing.”

“Was out of MI-6 by then, and I needed a job. Preferably one that paid well.” He munched his way through his first roll. “Anyway, the Russians have the best weapons caches you're going to find, and I needed to load up just about as much as I needed the cash.” He must have caught Luke's side eye, because he raised an eyebrow in response. “Does the person who willingly falls in line with Toretto and his lunatics have a problem with that?”

“I work with them, not for them, and what we do is sanctioned. Just like what you and I do.” And actually he hadn't worked with them much since he and Shaw had started partnering. Toretto and his crew were still around, and he'd seen some paperwork that indicated their handiwork cross his desk a time or two, but it was just easier to work with someone who had an actual background in the things that they needed to do rather than a group who constantly made things up on the fly. Not that there wasn't a time and place for improvisation, but 'a time' wasn't _every_ damn time.

“Uh-huh,” Shaw said, not even trying to hide the skepticism in his voice. “You really need that stamp of approval, don't you?”

And even if he still wanted to wring Shaw's neck on occasion.

“You're a pain in the ass, you know that?”

“Here I thought that was your thing.”

Luke choked at the sudden change in his tone. “God, that was awful.”

“You set yourself up for it,” Shaw said with a smirk.

Luke couldn't really argue the point, and he shook his head even as he grinned. “Seriously, awful.” He ate another roll and stared out at the ocean for a few minutes. “So what are you figuring for tomorrow?”

Shaw took a bite of his last roll. “I'm thinking that that David had the right of it and it's some arse at the courthouse who was pulling the strings on the bullshite order, but no argument that the guy who started whole the thing is no prince either. If the lot of them will cooperate and stay together it'll be easy enough to play guard on the way in and out when we're getting the stuff. And if we're lucky, the creep will show. Maybe with friends."

He looked happier about that idea than Lisa would probably like, especially since her definition of 'luck' would no doubt include no one showing up, but Luke completely understood.

"Unless the non-she-hulk Hobbs decides to shoot me in the back, of course. Or the miniature Hobbs stabs me in the knee on my way out the door.”

“Yet again, neither my sister nor my daughter is planning to attack you," Luke said with a sigh. "And you know, if you get sick of referring to everyone in my family by last name and random characteristic, you could try our actual names. I mean, I know Lisa has two syllables which might be getting a little hard for you to remember, but Sam and Luke are only one apiece.”

“Arse,” Shaw said with a snort.

“See, you're great with the one syllable words. And just saying, at least I'm not the one named after some random part of a ship. I mean, was rudder already taken?”

“Deckard's a family name you twit.”

“That no one seems to use; all I heard from anyone was Deck this and that.” Well, okay, Brixton might have called him Deckard once, but Luke wasn't taking that for anything.

“Mum calls me Dex.” A pause. “Forget I said that, and don't ever call me Dex.”

"Yeah, no worries there.” Somehow Deck suited just fine. Luke tossed down the last bite and then scrubbed his hands against the sand. “So since apparently my gym is out, you got any ideas for the afternoon.”

“You could always take a hint,” Shaw—Deck—said with a twitch of his lips, tone shifting again. “I mean, it might have been awful, but I wasn't actually arguing the point.”

Luke's fingers curled. He wasn't against the idea either, as it happened, although the boardwalk was just a little crowded for his tastes. “Figure twenty minutes back to my place—” maybe fifteen if Deck kept smirking at him like that—“and then I've got no problem bending you over a counter.”

A snort. “You think I'm putting up with a slab of granite in the gut you've got another thing coming, big man, but I suppose that couch looked comfortable enough if you're worried about what we might do to one of your beds.”


	10. Deck:  Favors V

Sam hopped out of the car as soon as her father pulled to a halt in the driveway of a small blue and white house, grabbing her backpack as she went. “Bye, Daddy, see you tomorrow!”

“Have fun with Janet, and be good for Mrs. Marshall,” Hobbs—or Luke, now, apparently, and damned if Deck had decided what he thought of that, called after her. “Love you!”

“Love you too!” She was already halfway to the door, but Luke waited until she was safely inside and a woman with dark hair waved at him before he put the truck in reverse.

Deck swung himself around from the cramped back seat and into the passenger seat, buckling himself in before Luke could complain.

“You could have let me tell her to sit in the back,” Luke said with a grin. "You are a guest and all that."

“Yeah, like I want your kid behind me when she has a backpack that could be full of sharp objects,” Deck shot back. Whatever Luke had to say about it, that kid had _not_ forgiven him for putting her father in the hospital and wasn't likely to at any point in the near future.

“I'm just going to repeat this again: paranoid.”

Deck ignored him. He hadn't been harmless at ten. Neither had his little brother. And most definitely neither had his little sister.

“There's a sidearm in the glove compartment if you want it,” Luke said, drawing him back to the present. “I doubt you'll need it, but I didn't figure that you brought one given that you flew commercial.”

“I didn't,” Deck agreed. He did have a set of knives, though, already concealed in their respective pockets, and in his hands they'd be more than enough to deal with anyone who thought that just having a gun made him dangerous. Still. More than one arsehole with that mistaken impression would mean taking the one from the first before dealing with the others, and today he had four civilians to protect. It wouldn't improve Sam's opinion of him if he allowed her aunt to get injured on his watch.

He opened the glove box, and it only took him a moment to find the catch to slide aside the false back. Amazingly enough for a weapon owned by Luke Hobbs, the sidearm tucked down in it was reasonably sized, and with a quick nod he moved it to the catches in his jacket that would keep it at the small of his back unless he needed it. Not the spot for his fastest draw, but fast enough, and it was the sort of thing that was best kept concealed unless he absolutely needed it. Especially since he had no permit for it in this city.

Then again, his knives were probably already long enough to violate most laws regarding weaponry. So it went.

“Is there any chance that any of the others will be armed?” he checked as he closed the glove box up again. He'd actually prefer that they weren't, but it was worth asking.

Luke shook his head immediately. “I got Lisa to go to an introductory firearms class once, but she hated it, and anyway the shelter policy forbids weapons on their property except for law enforcement personnel.”

Policy didn't mean a bloody thing to Deck—nor to Luke, obviously, under the circumstances—but Luke knew these people better than he did. He nodded.

When they got to the station a minivan had been pulled into the front parking lot, and Deck wasn't entirely thrilled to see Luke's sister with the keys in her hand. They weren't likely to need combat driving skills any more than he was likely to need the weapons he carried, but he'd still rather have control of the wheel. Just in case.

“Please don't pick a fight,” Luke said quietly as they approached the group.

Deck curled his lip at him automatically, but given that it had been a request with a please attached, 'don't tell me what to do' didn't apply. Damn it.

“Hello,” David greeted, and if he noticed Deck's disgruntled look he didn't show it as he smiled at the both of them. “Luke, I think you've might have met Mylie before, but if not this is Mylie Sanders, and this is Chloe Alvarez. Ladies, this is Lisa's brother Luke, and his friend Deckard Shaw who'll be accompanying you.”

Mylie nodded and waved cheerfully enough; Deck put her somewhere in her early twenties and either nervous and stubborn enough not to show it or naive as all hell. He hoped it was the former, but if she was a volunteer here his odds were good. Chloe was only a little older but there was a cast on her wrist and she barely lifted her head enough to nod and murmur hello. Also damn it, and for entirely different reasons.

From the flicker of anger that crossed Luke's expression he felt the same, but he had better sense than to say anything, and Lisa returned to her description of what was going to happen—the time-frame they had, the sorts of things they were allowed to recover, what to do if they were approached by Chloe's ex-boyfriend or one of his friends, that sort of thing—until a man somewhere around Mylie's age joined them.

“Sorry, traffic,” he said with a quick nod. “What did I miss?”

“You've done this before, so mostly just introductions,” Lisa said. “And since you know all of the rest of us already: Tyler Ross, Deckard Shaw; Shaw, Tyler.” She kept her focus on Tyler. “He's the friend of my brother's who's coming with us.”

Tyler looked at Deck curiously and offered a hand. “Hey. So you're with the government, then?”

“Well, not yours,” Deck said as he shook it. Nor, technically, his own anymore, but he saw no sense in confusing the issue.

Apparently 'a friend of my brother's' was all Lisa had said about him at all because his accent got a surprised look from Mylie as well, but Lisa turned for the van before any of them could ask any more questions. “Are we ready to go?”

Rather than arguing about who got to drive, Deck gritted his teeth and contented himself with the passenger seat. He could still get the lay of the land this way, at least.

The apartment building they were going to wasn't all that far from the shelter, and to Deck's relief the car park in front of it was acceptably open. Either there were far fewer people living here than the lot could bear or the majority of the residents had elsewhere to be on a Saturday afternoon. If it hadn't been so empty he'd have risked Lisa's ire by asking her to park on the street, but as it stood there was no easy way for them to get boxed in, especially when she took a spot on an endcap a decent distance from any other cars.

There were a stack of collapsed boxes on the seat next to Tyler who grabbed them as he climbed out of the van, and then Lisa locked it behind them. “Okay, Chloe, are you ready?” she asked quietly as they started towards the building. “Just remember, if any of your neighbors ask what's going on, you're just picking up your things, and if they want to have more of a conversation than that they can talk to me.” She patted her purse. “And I have the court order right here if anyone starts getting pushy.”

And if they got more obnoxious than that they could deal with Deck. No one said that, but apparently neither Tyler nor Mylie were completely oblivious as to why he was here because they both gave him looks. Chloe's head was still down.

The apartment was a walk-up which was just as well in Deck's opinion, any idiot knew that elevators made damn good kill boxes, and after confirming that no one had followed them up or was lurking in the hall, he stepped up beside the door as Lisa turned the key in the lock. “May I?”

From Lisa's expression she wanted to say 'no' just on general principle, but she wasn't an idiot and stepped back slightly with a marginal nod to let him inside first. It appeared empty, although he checked the closet and behind the kitchen counter anyway and then stuck his head in both the bedroom and bath before waving the others into the living area and locking the door behind them. Mylie's phone was up, and he frowned as she turned it towards him and he realized that she was recording. “What's that for?” he demanded. “Shut it off.” There were way too damn many people on this planet who wanted him to come to a bad end; putting out film of himself was not something that he had any interest in. Especially with other people's faces included.

“I can't,” she said with a shake of her head. “It's evidence. Or proof, I guess.” She shrugged. “Normally we'd have a police officer along to verify that we followed the rules of the writ, just in case someone tries to get nasty in court, but since none of them could come along this time it's the best we could come up with.”

As someone who knew exactly how easy it was to muck with recordings Deck wanted to tell her to shove it and shut it off anyway, but he could see her point. Not that it changed his opinion on the matter. Now that he knew what she was doing he could be careful about letting her get shots of his face, but it would have been nice if someone had thought to warn him because he had no interest in playing damage control with some stupid city court system.

Since there was no one lurking in the apartment, he made himself useful putting the boxes together in the main room so the others could fill them up. Conveniently enough keeping himself away from the camera and close to the door, although he had yet to hear so much as footsteps in the hall. He was mildly amazed that quite a bit of Chloe's clothing was intact, and even some bizarre little tchotchkes belonging to her scattered around the apartment, although she moaned a little over some missing pieces. Given how fragile the pieces looked Deck figured that she was lucky to have found any of them in any state to be rescued, but he kept his mouth shut. Apparently this idiot alpha had really thought she'd be coming back to him at some point.

In the end the sum total of Chloe's possessions didn't even fill four boxes, and after a bit of juggling he took the one that contained most of her shoes with a few toiletries thrown in for good measure. All nonbreakable if he needed to throw it, and heavy enough to give anyone he needed to throw it at at least a moment's pause. Chloe was holding the box with most of the glass bits tightly, and he kept his mouth shut and waited for the other three to sort out who was dealing with what.

“Can you think of anything else?” Mylie asked when the matter was settled, her phone still in her hand and the remaining collapsed boxes under her arm. “You got everything out of the bathroom?”

Chloe nodded and indicated the box that Deck held, which he shifted higher to obscure his face as Mylie turned her phone towards him.

“And the kitchen?”

“None of that was mine.”

“Okay, then, I think we're ready to go,” Lisa said. “Mr. Shaw?”

She was probably mocking him, but he'd have made sure that he was the first one into the hallway anyway so he just nodded and brought the box back down once his back was to the camera. Annoyingly enough there was no one waiting, nor did anyone give them so much as a second glance as they made their way back down the stairs and into the car park, and he was resigning himself to harassing Luke into another sparring match—that, or picking a fight with a couple idiots at that gym, that would suit too—when Chloe made a choked sound and he followed her gaze to find three men entering the car park from the street side and moving quickly in their direction. Judging by where her focus was the one on the lead would be her ex, but the others had similar features. Siblings, cousins, something along those lines, probably.

His lips twitched. Well, then.

Lisa gestured for them to keep walking towards the van, moving so she was on the side in the path of the approaching men, and Deck fell in behind her. They wouldn't quite reach the van before the men reached them in his estimation, but under the circumstances he was okay with that. A minivan wasn't much to have at his back anyway.

Whether she felt the same way or she just didn't want those arseholes to get too close to Chloe and the other volunteers, Lisa halted a few meters away from the van herself, and Deck reached out to take her box and set it aside with his, still staying a bit behind her. He didn't object to her taking point—not yet, anyway—but although Luke had mentioned self-defense classes the other day, he hadn't said how well they'd taken.

“And what do you think you're doing?” the one who had to be the ex demanded as she blocked his path. All three of them were taller than she was; taller than Deck too at a bit over six feet. Heavier as well, although not by enough to make a difference.

“Helping a friend move, not that that's any of your business,” she said coolly.

“I wasn't talking to you,” he said with a sneer. “Chloe, get over here!”

Tyler shot him a dirty look and then put an arm around Chloe's shoulder, urging her into the van, and Deck realized with a shake of his head that Mylie was still taking video.

“Hey, cut that out!” one of the other men ordered, apparently realizing the same thing, and she flipped him off even as Tyler tugged at her shirt to get her back into the van as well. Deck decided that he liked her, even if he was most definitely going to have to destroy that recording after this.

Under other circumstances the van wasn't actually where Deck would have wanted them to be, with its glass windows and limited means of egress, but since none of these idiots were going to get past him he was perfectly fine with the action. It would make it faster to get out of here afterwards, if nothing else.

“Chloe, get over here,” the ex barked again. “And _you_ can just get out of my way so we can inspect those boxes and find out what kind of thieves you are.” That was directed at Lisa as he took a step closer to her, and although she held her ground, Deck could see how tightly her fingers were wrapped around the strap of her purse. Which was about enough, all things considered.

“You aren't 'inspecting' anything, and if your lawyer wants to claim some kind of theft I'm sure the nice young lady behind me will be happy to share her video with the judge,” Deck said, stepping up and making all of their eyes snap to him. “In fact I would wager that the judge will insist on viewing just how carefully you followed his instructions.”

The ex's jaw worked, and Deck felt his own jaw twitch in a very different way as all three of them focused even more tightly on him. At this point there was no indication that he'd need his knives at all, never mind the gun at his back, but he was going to enjoy bouncing their heads off the pavement a few times.

Lisa shifted a little, and he made a casual wave backwards, hoping she'd take the hint and join the others in the van. The one thing that could make this messier than he'd like—well, messier than it needed to be; no comment on what he'd like—was if she tried to help and one of them got the bright idea to grab her.

“You think you're a match for us?” the ex asked with a sneer. “I was a wrestler in high school, and Mark has a black belt.”

Mark apparently being the idiot off to his left, and Deck sized him up quickly. From his stance he probably did have some martial arts training. It wouldn't matter, but it was nice of them to give him a heads-up. Deck nodded to the third man. “And tweedle-three does basket weaving in his spare time?”

The man who'd yelled at Mylie to stop recording flushed angrily. “I don't need martial arts to beat the shit out of some smart-mouthed omega.”

“Can it, Tory.” The ex stepped forward, jabbing Deck in the chest. “I'm going to talk to Chloe. Get out of my way.”

“Don't touch me.”

“Oh, don't touch me.” This time he pressed a hand against Deck's chest, trying to use his greater weight to force Deck to take a step backwards. It didn't work, but he didn't seem to notice. “Does the big, bad omega think he can—”

Deck grabbed his wrist and twisted in the same instant that he stepped slightly to the side, and the ex spun and went to his knees with a scream of pain. “Was there some part of 'don't touch me' that was unclear?” Deck asked. “Ah—” He held up his free hand as the other two started to step forward. “The next one of you that moves, I snap his wrist just like he did hers.” He bent it a little further, drawing another choked-off scream, to illustrate. “Do you really want that on your conscience?”

It wasn't actually a good hold; Deck had turned the ex away when he'd bent his wrist back to avoid giving him an easy shot at any of Deck's more sensitive parts with his free arm, but a decent fighter would have been able to counter it quickly. This idiot was clearly used to getting his way by force alone, though—if he had wrestled in secondary his coach should be ashamed—and what he was trying now was likely to lead to him breaking his own wrist. On the other hand, the fact that the other two were clearly straining in place was a pretty good indication that they'd come into this planning to use their fists alone. If they had any kind of weapons on them, their fingers would be twitching towards them right about now.

Given that, Deck grabbed the ex's hair in his free hand and bent his head back so he had to look Deck in the eye, momentarily stopping his struggles. “Let me explain what's going to happen next. And you're going to be a good little boy, or I'm going to start doing things that will require calling you an ambulance. Is that clear?”

The idiot tried to snarl, which worked about as well as one would expect when there were tears leaking involuntarily from his eyes.

“I said, is that clear?” A little more pressure on both his scalp and his wrist. “I can just leave you crying on the pavement as a demonstration piece, if you'd like.”

He whimpered involuntarily.

“Good. Now.” Deck looked up at met the other two's eyes, making sure that they were still staying put, before returning his gaze to the ex. “Personally I'm fine with snapping a few of your worthless bones, but I suspect that's frowned upon around here and we are on video and such. So as much as I don't like it, I'm going to let your cowardly arse go, and you and these other two pieces of shite are going to walk away without so much as backwards glance. If anyone tries anything other than walking away....” He smiled and made damn sure all of them saw in. Another twist of the wrist he had pinned, this time hard enough that Deck could feel bones grind under his hand. “Have I made myself clear?”

The ex made another sound, and only an idiot wouldn't be able to tell how this was going to go given the looks of thoughtless rage the other two were directing at him, but that suited Deck just fine as he jerked the man back to his feet and tossed him at the martial artist in a move nearly identical to the one he'd used on the gym owner yesterday. 

He didn't even have time to turn as tweedle-three charged him, fists swinging, and he felt his smile harden. At least no one could say that he hadn't warned them.

Normally Deck would just sidestep such a shite move and wait for the knobhead to come back around, but in this case there was a van of people back there and he hadn't heard the door shut never mind lock. He still sidestepped, but he also hooked the man's nearest leg out from under him, sending him sprawling forward. Or starting to, anyway, as Deck grabbed his collar and yanked him back up, using the man's lack of balance to spin in front of him and slam his elbow back into a particularly sensitive part of tweedle-three's gut. Deck repeated the elbow strike against tweedle-three's face when the man went to his knees, and bone crunched with the second hit. The man ended up curled on the pavement with one hand clamped to his bloody face and the other to his stomach, and Deck smiled and stepped clear in preparation for the other two.

Martial arts Mark attacked next, but while he had lovely form, Deck had never had much use for tournament fighting. He deflected the first kick, slammed aside a punch before returning it with interest, and then when Mark geared up for a full roundhouse locked him up and spun them so the ex took it in the stomach. It hadn't been quite the angle that Deck would have preferred, most of the force already spent before the blow connected, but the ex did go to his knees, and Mark stepped back, clearly shocked. Deck took the opportunity to double him over with a punch to the stomach and then kneed him in the face hard enough to land him in the same position as tweedle-three.

Someone hit Deck from behind, then, pinning his arms to his sides and trying to use his greater weight to force Deck to the ground, and Deck might have been a little impressed at how quickly the ex had recovered if he hadn't been so disgusted by the clumsiness of the attack. In a pinch it could have worked for someone like Luke, someone who knew to pull him backwards and take away his leverage, but this idiot.... Deck didn't bother to fight the weight, he just dropped to one knee and used the momentum to toss the arsehole over his shoulder. Snagging and arm and snapping it viciously inwards as he did so which had the advantage of both dislocating the shoulder and also spinning the ex into the pavement face first.

Three broken noses, a few bruises, and one dislocated shoulder were apparently all it took to take cowards like these out of action and he shook his head at the moaning figures on the ground around him. He couldn't even remember a time when a broken nose had been worthy of _notice_ in a fight.

He waited for a moment longer to confirm that none of them were planning to get up anytime soon and then turned back towards the van with a shake of his head. And found four people staring at him with various expressions of disbelief. “What?” he had to ask. “That's what you wanted me here for, right?”


	11. Luke: Favors VI

Luke straightened, taking a punch that he'd normally have blocked, and Deck's eyes narrowed. Luke had had this planned out since he'd realized where in the yard their current match was taking them, though, and with a grin he planted an open hand on Deck's chest and shoved.

Deck hit the water with a splash and came up cursing, and Luke directed a mental apology at the neighbors even as he smirked outwardly. The fences around the back yard had survived their sparring match thus far, but Deck was only quiet when he wanted to be. It was probably a good thing that even _he_ wasn't sure what some of the names that he was being called meant.

Deck eventually wound down and kicked over to the side. “This is the only pair of shoes I brought with me, you wanker.”

Luke scoffed. “Unless you've got a flight out in the next two hours that you haven't told me about, they'll dry.”

Deck flipped two fingers at him and then held out a hand, and Luke took an automatic step forward before his sense of self-preservation kicked in and halted him in his tracks. Pulling Deck out was the obvious, polite thing to do, hence his immediate reaction, but the day Deckard Shaw needed help getting out of a swimming pool he'd eat his weight bench.

“And you call me paranoid.” Deck rolled his eyes and lifted himself out with one arm, twisting to take a seat on the side. “If you ruined these shoes, I swear....”

“Oh, quit your bitching,” Luke said, matching the eye roll as Deck took them off and set them on the concrete beside him. “You live in London. If your shoes couldn't stand up to a little water they'd have dissolved the first time you wore them outside.”

Deck shook his head and began to fiddle with his shirt, and Luke stepped up beside him and nudged him lightly with a boot.

“What, all worn out? I mean, I guess you did have to spend a whole hour today hiding from a woman with a camera and then sucker punching a couple idiots.” Not that it had been fun explaining to Lisa and David and the others why they could never post anything with Deck's face in it on Youtube or anywhere else, even when it had been a very sanitized version of 'why'—it hadn't even occurred to Luke that they'd be recording although after Lisa had explained it made perfect sense, and he was just glad that Chloe's ex would want that recording deleted even more than anyone else—but Deck's disgust with the lack of an actual fight had lead directly to this sparring match.

He knew full well what he was courting with a comment like that, but he was expecting something like a tackle, not to have Deck's button up suddenly wrapped around one knee. As a sharp tug left him awkwardly throwing all of his weight onto his other leg, Deck launched himself up, caught the front of his shirt, and dragged them both into the water.

“You're an asshole,” Luke informed him as he broke the surface again. He couldn't get much heat behind it considering that he'd started things, though, and he tugged open the laces of his own boots and tossed them and his socks up on the deck. He'd have pulled himself out too, but from the expression on Deck's face trying would just mean getting dragged back under. At least if he stayed in the water he had a chance at deflecting a strike. Besides, they had to have been sparring for a good two hours by now, long enough that getting dunked actually felt pretty good.

Luke grinned. Plus, he generally had a pretty obvious advantage when it came to grappling matches, and the pool wasn't that big.

Unfortunately Deck swam like a damn fish despite wearing long pants instead of the shorts that Luke and every other rational person in this city preferred—and another shirt, of course, because the man had a completely unhealthy attachment to layers—and that more than evened things out even if his usual lightning strikes were hampered while underwater. Luke was having trouble even getting a grip on the wiry little bastard. Although....

This time his grin was inward, and the next time Deck twisted around him Luke got a hand on his ass and squeezed. Obviously he'd never do it in a real fight, among other things it left him open to all kinds of nasty strikes in return, but under the circumstances he wasn't overly concerned.

Deck rolled free and broke the surface a few feet away from Luke, swearing again, but this time he didn't look particularly put out. “That's the best you've got?”

“Why don't you come over here and find out?”

He smirked and stepped closer. “You really want to give your neighbors that kind of show, then?”

It was a fair point, damn it, the privacy fences weren't that private, and they'd already had some language more than a little atypical for the neighborhood inflicted on them this afternoon. Luke glanced over Deck's shoulder towards the house. “The shower's big enough for...well, one person and a hobbit should be fine.”

Another step closer. “So I'm good and you're stuck with the garden tap, then?”

Luke's fingers twitched. “See, this is when I start to understand why black ops troops might be running random facial recognition searches in the hopes that they'll get a chance to murder you in your sleep. I just—” he broke off with a frown, and Deck twisted to scan the area quickly.

“Just what?” he asked, turning back to look at Luke.

Luke hesitated. It wasn't really the kind of question you asked a sort-of-friend, however sure the benefits were, but for all that he didn't have a lot of experience with omegas, he was pretty sure that it wasn't the kind of thing that you _didn't_ ask either. At least not when things were going the way that things seemed to be going. “How close are you to another heat?”

Deck jerked his head back, looking surprised. “About three days from—” He broke off, apparently coming to the same conclusion that Luke just had about the scent change in the air, and then his lips curled in a snarl. “Bloody fucking _hell_.” He kicked himself up onto the deck and began to stalk towards the house, and Luke boosted himself out of the water and hurried after him.

“Hold up!” He got a hand on Deck's shoulder and then immediately jerked back out of reach as Deck spun on him. “Hold up,” he repeated, holding his hands up. “What does it matter? I mean, we managed fine before, didn't we?” He grinned quickly. “And it's not like we weren't already headed that way.”

“It matters because I'm somehow off the fucking cycle that I've been on for thirty bloody years,” Deck snarled. “It matters because....” He shook his head. “I don't do this. One heat, one alpha, and then I never fucking see them again. Ever.”

“Well, unless you want to find another partner we've already pretty well burned that bridge,” Luke pointed out. And then kind of wished that he hadn't as Deck shot him an absolutely murderous look. “We have fun, don't we? It's not like it's suddenly more than that.”


	12. Deck:  On the Other Side I

“You know, I might as well have airlifted in a bloody brass band for all the time you took,” Deck complained as he let himself fall the last two meters, blunting the impact with his knees. He'd have dropped further and rolled through it under other circumstances, especially given the state of that ladder, but that was never a great plan when you had a sniper rifle on your back. “Hattie could raise a ruckus faster than that when she was ten!”

“Aw, I'm sorry, I know how much you need your beauty sleep,” Luke said with a smirk as he knelt to check the first body.

Deck flipped him off automatically before pausing to police the brass that had fallen through the grating of the metal walkway. Not that there was likely to be any kind of investigation, not for this particular lot of lunatics in this nowhere corner of the world, but it was the principle of the thing. “My arse is numb,” he muttered, shooting another scowl at Luke. He was the better sniper of the two of them anyway, but even if he hadn't been there was no way that Luke could have made it up onto that platform without bringing the whole thing crashing down in exactly the wrong kind of commotion. And yet neither of those facts had made the last hour any less uncomfortable.

Luke looked up, lips twitching. “Now, see, that's s—” He broke off whatever comment he'd been about to make, frowning at whatever he'd pulled from the man's vest. “Well, then, isn't this suspicious?”

Considering that this lot had been making a name for themselves for bombs targeting tech-rich sites— although when 'tech-rich' meant 'place that people used mobiles' per the translation of their latest manifesto Deck was still curious what their actual targeting criteria was—he couldn't say that he'd been expecting to find any of them carrying a top of the line mobile. A bomb vest, sure, there was a reason he'd gone for head shots as Luke had driven them out of the building, but.... “Calls his mum every Sunday?” he suggested.

Luke scoffed and threw the phone at him, and he checked that it was well and truly off and then tucked it into his own vest. He'd see what he could pry out of it before he handed it over to whichever of Mr. Nobody's minions appeared at their hotel back in the city to meet them this time. None of the rest of the bodies yielded anything of interest, at least not beyond two of the explosive vests that he and Luke had both been expecting, and after making sure that neither had any kind of backup timer he nodded to the building. “You see anything worth anything in there?”

“Nothing you couldn't pick up at any local hardware store.” He shook his head. “Unless you want to sweep for more phones, I'm thinking we just torch the lot. Way too many suspiciously-empty rooms, loose boards, and exposed wiring where it had no business being for my tastes.”

That description matched the few glimpses that Deck had had of the interior through his scope and was why Luke's job had been to bring the fight outside and conveniently in front of Deck's rifle rather than them going in together and engaging in the kind of fistfight that they both preferred. However inexact those manifestos had been, they'd had the distinct feel of the fanatic to them, and neither Deck nor Luke had survived this long by being stupid.

Not that Deck was inclined to give Luke the benefit of the doubt or anything, but making damn sure that he didn't put a foot wrong and lose a leg or worse for his troubles was probably why it had taken him as long as it had to get the bad guys moving.

Their four-wheeler was parked half a dozen kilometers away, more than far enough that their approach had stood no chance of warning their targets of what was coming, and after kludging together a couple of delayed fuses for the bomb vests in lieu of those backup timers and tossing them into the building they headed back out into the darkness.

There was a rumble behind them and then fire shooting into the sky ten minutes or so into the run, and Deck glanced back without breaking his stride. “Whether those supplies came from a DIY shop or not, they must have had a lot of them.”

“Had to have been more than I saw for that kind of blow-up for sure,” Luke agreed, although his attention returned to the ground in front of them almost immediately.

He was trying to hide it, but while he obviously _could_ run he clearly didn't do it for fun the way Deck sometimes did. Which wasn't a surprise; longer legs or not he also carried considerably more bulk, and Deck had set the pace at his usual ground-eating lope without thinking much about it. He smirked. “Worn out already, twinkle-toes? And here I thought rut was supposed to give you more energy.”

Luke gave him a side-eye. “Oh, I've got plenty of energy, princess.” 

One hand shot out in a distinctly targeted grope, and Deck's fingers curled as he only narrowly avoided the grip. 

“I was just being considerate of your poor numb ass.”

Deck growled. “Being _considerate_, were you?” He'd been debating whether or even to bring up the rut. It had been pretty obvious when they'd met in the airport that it was on the downswing, and for all he knew Luke had already found someone to wind it down on. His fingers curled a little tighter at that idea—idiot lizard hindbrain shite; he bloody hated biology sometimes—but being willing to fuck Deck through a couple heats didn't mean that Luke's preferences had changed in any way. They had some fun, sure, but that was it.

Still, in the name of fun, Deck had some energy to burn and it seemed like Luke did too. Crappy jogging skills aside.

What Deck could make out of the scenery around them didn't reveal anywhere very promising, all sand and gravel and scrub, and the city would be at least a three hour drive once they reached their four-wheeler even with him behind the wheel. Then again the weather was decent, and the four-wheeler had a flatbed and held both of their bags since they hadn't been sure whether they'd be able to take the cell out tonight or if they'd need to spend a few days out here on reconnaisance. And in the end neither of them was overly picky.


	13. Luke:  On the Other Side II

“Taking your bloody time about everything today, aren't you?” Deck taunted, pressing back into Luke.

Luke's tongue flicked out even as he ground down, and he very much enjoyed the strangled noise that followed. “Whiny today, aren't you?”

There were still times when Luke was surprised by just how fast Deck was, and he groaned despite himself. And then shifted his weight to do some damage of his own.

This time Deck was the one who bucked and choked off what absolutely sounded like a whine no matter what he had to say about it, and Luke grinned. Internally, anyway, since his mouth was otherwise occupied.

“Use your teeth then, if you want to,” Deck growled.

That was enough to bring Luke up short, and he flipped them around so Deck was straddling him and they were able to look each other in the eye. Deck reacted quickly enough, bracing his hands to ride Luke, but Luke's grip on his thighs kept him in place, and as his eyes narrowed, Luke hastened to explain. “You said you don't like teeth. I wouldn't....” Just because he might have the urge to nibble a little didn't mean that he couldn't respect a simple 'no.'

Deck's forehead creased for a moment, and then he rolled his eyes. “I said I've got no use for bleeding or picking up new scars. Wouldn't have an argument with teeth except for the fact that arseholes always come too close to getting their fangs in before I realize that I need to kick them across the room.”

A part of Luke automatically wanted to go hunt down said assholes and deal with them, and never mind that aside from the damage of the kick itself Deck was generally willing and able to put people through walls as well, but that was eclipsed by the fact that Deck had basically openly declared that he trusted Luke. Which, okay, yeah, they regularly accompanied each other into the middle of all manner of terrorist cells and would-be militias and that sort of thing with the absolutely-never-spoken understanding that they'd watch each others' backs, but that was....

“What are you bloody grinning about?” Deck snapped. “I thought rut was supposed to make you _useful_.”

Jackass. Luke shifted his grip quickly. “I'll show you _useful_.”

* * *

Luke woke up and it took him a few minutes to orient himself, at which point he rolled onto his back with a groan. “You bastard.”

Deck lifted his head from where he was stretched out on the flatbed a few feet away and smirked, and if that last round, initiated just when Luke had been ready to fall into a pleasantly sated sleep because Deck was absolutely the bastard that Luke had named, had left him anywhere near as drained as Luke felt he gave no sign of it. Hell, from the look of things he'd already been up for a bit, and most of his attention was on the phone in his hands. Or on the pair of phones, rather, because he had his in one hand and the one Luke had found last night in the terrorist's vest in the other.

Since Deck didn't seem inclined to do anything helpful, Luke rolled to his feet and went to see what was on the camp stove. The first pot was coffee, and decently strong coffee at that, and after half a cup he decided that he could forgive Deck. At least temporarily. Especially since the other reason for the lingering edge of exhaustion was pretty clear once he started paying attention. Between the mission, even if it hadn't been the sort of mission that he preferred, and the sex, his rut was finally spent. For the most part that was a relief, but the sense of bone-deep tiredness that always followed was an annoyance of a different kind. And there was no chance that Deck wouldn't give him crap about it, either because Deck thoroughly enjoyed tormenting him. Reference last night as an example.

Not that he'd objected in the moment. And he'd gotten plenty of his own back, all things considered.

Still.

He drained another cup of coffee and wolfed down the remaining potful of quick-oat camp rations on the grounds that if Deck had wanted more he'd have had the sense to get them before Luke went after his third bowl. It was a shame they hadn't gotten the call on these creeps a few days ago. Well, it was a shame that they hadn't gotten the call on these creeps a few months ago and saved at least one bombing run, but that sort of regret wasn't the kind of thing he could do anything about. He'd learned a long time ago that he couldn't beat himself up for not being psychic.

On the personal side, though, a few days earlier would have meant at the peak of his rut, and while at the time he'd been doing his usual when he didn't feel like going clubbing to take the edge off—spending a lot of extra time at the gym and pretending very hard that there weren't what felt like an army of ants crawling along his nerves—he wouldn't have minded spending it with Deck. But you didn't just show up on your partner's doorstep, especially when he lived halfway around the world and there was never a guarantee as to whether he'd answer the door anyway.

Might have been nice, though.

He gave the pot a quick rinse and a scrub with sand and then stood again. A disadvantage to camping in the middle of nowhere was a distinct lack of showers, but he cleaned up as best he could and grabbed a change of clothes before taking a seat by Deck. “Find anything interesting?”

“Not sure yet. He was in contact with someone, but it's all in code.”

“Ciphers?”

“That would be easier. This all sounds like he's talking to his mate about the latest football matchups.”

“Hm.” Luke reached out to tilt the phone so he could see it too, and Deck had to have genuinely been stuck because he didn't immediately threaten to stab Luke with anything. Not that Luke would have let him, obviously, but it was the principle of the thing. “Any chance you can tell where his friend hangs out?” Luke checked.

“Bolivia.”

“Bolivia? Like South America? And these guys are based _here_? How solid is that?”

“Solid enough that I said it.” He pulled himself up onto his knees beside Luke, and Luke thought that maybe he wasn't moving quite as smoothly as he normally did. Maybe. Small consolation.

“And these numbers have got to mean something, but I'm not seeing it,” he groused.

Luke stared at the screen for a few more moments, but even if he was perfectly competent with the basics tech had never been his specialty. And coded messages were even less so, at least when he didn't have any personal knowledge of his target to help him sort through the noise. Sometimes the sheer range of what Deck dabbled in was a little terrifying when he thought about it. He slapped Deck's shoulder lightly. “Come on, we did our job. Let's head for town, get it to Mr. Nobody's geeks, and see what they can get out of it.”

Deck didn't look thrilled with that idea, and Luke sighed.

“Is there anything you haven't been able to clone off it if you decide you want to play around later?"

That got him a curled lip, and he rolled his eyes.

"Then let the geeks have their day. Besides, we've got a hotel room waiting for us back in the city.” Technically they probably had two, but they'd pretty well stopped pretending that they weren't at least spending nights together. And the odd day, too, mostly before their respective flights. The airport here wasn't a large hub so maybe they'd get lucky and have a little downtime...not that he was up for another go right now, but he was starting to wear Deck down on the whole conversation thing.

“I suppose one of us could use a shower,” Deck said, setting the phones down and swinging himself around so he could hop off the flatbed

Luke smirked in response to his pointed tone and pushed himself back to his feet too. “I mean, I wasn't going to say it. It's not your fault there's no running water nearby.”

“Arse.”

It only took a few minutes to break things down and toss it all back into the four-wheeler, and then since Deck had gone back to scowling at the terrorist's phone Luke snagged the keys from him and climbed in on the driver's side. “Train's leaving the station, princess, are you coming or do you feel like a nice long walk?”

Deck rolled his eyes and swung himself in on the passenger side. “I can see about five trees in the general direction of 'in front of us.' Try to miss at least four of them, would you?”


	14. Deck:  On the Other Side III

Bloody Bolivia. Deck glared at the screen of the terrorist's phone, but the information didn't change. What was going on in Bolivia and why would it be connected to this lot of lunatics way out here?

The big hand sliding absently down his back found the knot of muscle that always tightened annoyingly just under his left shoulder blade, and he bit off a groan as fingers drove into it. “Bugger off, you wanker.” He knew he should have made the man get his own room.

“So tense.” Luke appeared to have regained full consciousness after his nap and as usual looked more amused than offended, and Deck debated if it was worth expending the effort to kick him off the bed they were currently sharing. Probably not, especially since that obnoxious bit of muscle took the hint and finally released under Luke's ministrations.

Mr. Nobody's minion of the week hadn't been here when they'd reached town, but since they'd finished the mission faster than even they'd predicted they would that wasn't totally a surprise. Annoying, since it meant they had to hang around until whoever it was showed up to collect the phone—well, that or he took it back to London with him, but he wasn't particularly interested in Mr. Nobody showing up on his doorstep—but nothing that wasn't handled by spending a night or two in a hotel.

Luke sat up, both hands now working their way down Deck's back easing tension as they went, and Deck sighed and dropped his forehead into the mattress. Next time he was definitely making the bastard get his own room. He was.

“Don't know about you, but I'm—”

Something _clicked_ outside of their room, not a footstep or a gun or anything else so immediately recognizable, and Luke's work was undone as Deck snapped to high alert, rolling silently off the side of the bed and grabbing for the tactical vest on the bedside table. It was Luke's rather than his, but that didn't particularly matter at the moment.

“—getting hungry,” Luke continued, the pause barely detectable even to Deck, but his eyes were focused on the door as well. 

Deck freed Luke's hand cannon and passed it to him. “Oh, you're hungry are you?” He scoffed. “And in other news, the sun rises in the east.” 

Luke flipped him off, probably legitimately in response to Deck's reply, but his expression was serious and his gun stayed steadily on the door.

Mr. Nobody's lackey would have knocked or more likely called first since whether they were minions or not Deck had never seen any of them inclined to the suicidal. Hospitality would have knocked and announced themselves. Someone staying in one of the rooms near theirs would have moved along. He edged along the wall, checking the window quickly, but while it would do in a pinch, it was higher than he'd prefer to jump from if he had other options. And with the exception of his knife, his gear was piled on the chair by the loo. Out of reach unless he wanted to cross the center of the room. 

“No need to get snippy,” Luke said, still focused on the door. “I saw a restaurant off the hotel lobby on our way in, and I'm sure they have a children's menu they'd be happy to offer you.”

“Yeah, but I didn't see a trough so what are you going to do?” After he finished speaking, Deck began to edge around the room towards the door, keeping his back against the wall.

“Oh, I'm hurt. It's almost like you don't like all this, and I know that's not right.”

Deck rolled his eyes at the man's smirk, but by the end of Luke's sentence he'd reached the door frame. As soon as he was in position he met Luke's eyes, and Luke nodded.

Deck reached across the door for the knob, but his hand was still a few centimeters from it when the door exploded inwards and he vaguely registered stabbing pain up his arm as reflexes took over.

He grabbed the barrel of the automatic held by the lead idiot with his uninjured arm, using it to swing the man around to slam headfirst into the wall. As the man reeled on impact Deck started to swivel back to cover the entrance, but Luke was suddenly there grabbing their second would-be-assailant by the throat. That was sorted, then.

Deck turned back, taking advantage of the first attacker's continued disorientation to grab him by the nape of his neck and slam him headfirst into the wall again, this time hard enough to put him down and keep him there.

He slid to the floor unconscious at about the same time Luke slammed the back of the second man's head into the wall on the other side of the door, and it had to be plaster because if it was drywall the man would have been right back out the other side. 

There was a third man who'd started to come forward behind the other two, but when he changed his mind and turned to run Deck's knife took him the back of the knee and Luke grabbed him by the collar and jerked him into the room. As soon as he was inside Deck closed the door. 

Or he closed the remains of the door, anyway. And of course there weren't any conveniently-sized wardrobes to drag in front of it anywhere in the room. While he secured the door as best he could, Luke stripped their captive of his gun and a few other weapon secreted on his person and then dropped him on the floor.

The man spat something in...well, Deck knew a few words of the local language, but this didn't sound like that which meant that it was probably one of the dozen or so dialects from the region. And there was no sign of any comprehension on the man's face to indicate that his lack of an understandable response was a ruse, although their glares seemed to be enough to encourage him to stay still. That or Luke's gun, anyway, although he'd done his best to keep their part of the fight as quiet as Deck had.

“I don't suppose you followed that?” he asked Luke, accepting his knife back. Not that he typically bothered with questioning his attackers, especially since even if his and Luke's counterattack had been reasonably quiet that first explosion certainly hadn't been, but this had been just about out of the blue. Right now he couldn't say if it had been retaliation for last night, something involving bloody Bolivia that was in some way tied to last night, or someone recognizing him and trying to exact some sort of personal revenge. Hell, it could even be the latter but directed at Luke.

Luke shook his head and then shrugged and uttered a phrase that Deck was ninety-nine percent certain was a request for a beer. Their captive gave him a distinctively disbelieving look as well, and Luke sighed and dug out his phone. “Cross you fingers for technology, I guess.”

Deck doubted that even the common language around here was something that any of the major tech companies had spent a lot of translation time on, but if Luke wanted to try, fine. “I'm going to clean up and pack up.” They didn't have long before someone showed up, and he wanted to be gone when it happened. And to get the damn splinters out of his arm, especially since he hadn't been wearing body armor when he'd gotten hit. 

He did a quick and dirty job with the cleanup and was mostly good by the time Luke joined him by the sink, and he looked up with a raised eyebrow as Luke reached out to turn his arm. “Anything?”

“I knew I should have picked up a dictionary in the airport. Not that he seemed inclined to be cooperative, but I've still got no clue if he recognized me or you or what we did last night or just generally had it out for whoever decided to rent this room. That looks nasty.”

“Nothing's broken, and we've got bigger things to worry about.” Deck wrapped a bandage down his arm and then tied it off quickly. “What did you do with him?” Personally he'd have gone for a bullet to the brain, but he hadn't heard any shots. And Luke tended to be a lot less final about that kind of thing.

“Knocked him out. As much as I enjoy a good game of charades, there's no way what they did to the door is going to go unnoticed very long, and that's assuming that no one is going to come looking for our new friends. The one you clobbered had a two-way radio on him.” He made a face. “None of them had IDs, of course, although I did grab pictures in case you want to try facial recognition.

It wasn't the worst idea he'd ever heard, especially since the lack of Mr. Nobody's minion suddenly seemed a lot more suspicious than it had when they'd made it into town this morning. Deck glanced at the two other members of the would-be-assault team, but the odds of either of them regaining consciousness anytime soon in order to answer a few questions were nonexistent. “Later. Right now I think we'd better get moving. And not to the airport, either, because I'm betting whoever planned this will be on us in a second if we try to get on a plane.”

“Especially since with three whole gates we're not going to find much cover.” Luke pulled out his phone and tapped something on the screen, frowning for a moment before looking back at Deck. “There's a decent-sized city about three hundred clicks away, but it's switchbacks up and over the mountains for most of it. We could probably manage a through hike in about the same amount of time, but the terrain will be rough once we get off the flats. And I'm not sure if the airport will be any better when we get there, although at least we'll able to blend in a little more.”

“If you're thinking about blending in, we're going to have to ground you down to a reasonable size,” Deck pointed out.

Luke's smirk returned. “See, there you go again. You know you like this.”

Just because the guy was good in bed—and okay, sometimes tolerable out of it if Deck felt like being honest, which obviously he did not—really. “What kind of road are we talking about?”

“According to this it's two lane, although I suspect that's being generous.”

Probably still better than trying to hike it, but that kind of setup practically screamed ambush and they didn't have the right armament for that kind of battle. Luke was no idiot, though, no matter what Deck had to say about him sometimes; if he said that was their best route than it probably was.

Luke's amusement abruptly fell away abruptly. “Deck that's going right through the bandage. Maybe I should take a look.”

“What?” He looked down to glare at his arm. Okay, fine, there had been some shredding of skin too. And maybe some minor burns. But nothing was broken nor had any of the shards managed to nick an artery, and they had bigger concerns right now. “It's fine. I'll live.” He pulled his tactical gear, which included sleeves like any sane person's, back on over his shirt and bit back a hiss as it put new pressure on his arm. “Let's get moving. The back staircase will let us avoid the lobby.”

“Unless that's how our friends came in and their friends are waiting for us outside.” 

He wasn't wrong, but if they went out the front they'd have the desk staff to contend with, and under the circumstances who knew who's payroll they were on. “Do you want to jump out the window?”

Luke glanced through it but apparently came to the same conclusion that Deck had earlier as he pushed what Deck had managed to pile up in front of the door out of the way. “Leapfrog?”

They were both on high alert but made it down without attracting any notice. In Deck's estimation that only raised the probability that the desk staff had been in on the attack because there was no way that someone hadn't heard the door being blown inwards, and he checked his sidearm again.

There was a man standing just outside the back door when Luke pulled it open, but his back was to them which gave Deck plenty of opening. His first punch as the man started to turn drove into his stomach in a way that guaranteed that he wouldn't be shouting for help, and the second knocked him out.

“Hope he wasn't just out here for a smoke,” Luke muttered, stomping on a cigarette that the man had apparently dropped when Deck had attacked..

“Nasty habit anyway.” They could stop and search him, but he doubted that it would get them anything, and Deck was more concerned with putting a few kilometers between them and this place. Then again.... “Has he got any keys on him?”


	15. Luke:  On the Other Side IV

Luke caught Deck's eye, and it was obvious that he wasn't the only one done with the situation. Oh, sure, those deep ruts that had slowed them to nearly nothing as Deck fought to keep their crappy stolen vehicle climbing could have been exacerbated by what passed for rainfall in these parts. The truck in front of them could have made that last turn a little too quickly and just happened to end up on its side and blocking the entire road. It could have been a work truck and that was why there were now six men spaced out around them. But that was a few too many coincidences for Luke, and the fact that all six were alphas? Luke doubted that they were part of any formal military unit, but he had no trouble believing they were of the para sort. With or without the knowledge of the local government.

Of course, the way they were crowding Deck, especially the one right on the edge of rut, indicated that they were idiots, too. Even if he was smaller than anyone else on the road and the only non-alpha in the lot—as per usual he was passing as a beta at the moment—the look on his face should have been more than enough to convince them to give him space.

A small and clearly suicidal part of Luke kind of wanted to move closer to Deck and make the leering asshole back the hell away from his omega, despite the fact that Deck was about to get sudden and violent with the guy himself and would absolutely turn that anger on Luke if he ever tried anything that stupid. Doubly so since Deck wasn't 'his' anything except partner. He stopped the frustrated growl in his throat and surveyed the group in front of them again.

Thus far their language problems continued unabated with this group, not that Luke got the impression that any of the men were actually trying to communicate anything useful about how to get their truck out of the way so he and Deck could get past. The way one of the men in the back of the group had twitched when he and Deck had said a few words to each other made Luke suspect that he understood at least a little English, but he hadn't actually said anything so there was no way to know. Luke still wished he'd picked up a damn dictionary.

The leering man moved even closer to Deck and said something in a distinctly oily tone, and Luke gritted his teeth and focused on that man at the back. “I don't suppose you want to give us a hand here?”

The nominal leader, a man about Luke's size, looked startled and then turned and snarled something at the man Luke had spoken to. He shrugged and responded, and they went back and forth for a few moments. Then the man looked directly at Luke, pointing to the man leering at Deck. “Him want one on....” He broke off with a frown and then shrugged again and pointed at his knees. Then he pointed at the leader. “Him want two on.”

Definitely no point taking this any further, then. “Shall we, Princess?”

Deck's hand shot out, grabbing the leering asshole by his collar and yanking him into a headbutt, crushing his nose before kicking one knee in and sending him to the ground screaming. A kick to the head put him out and returned them to silence abruptly. “Hate to break it to you, Twinkle-toes, but you're the only person out here who's been thinking we're all going to have a nice chat.”

The other five had reeled back at the sudden violence that had left their compatriot unconscious in the dirt without haven't even having had time to raise a hand in his own defense, and they still hadn't recovered when Luke and Deck stepped forward together. The fight was over almost before it began, and Luke sighed as he surveyed the overturned truck behind the scattered and unconscious bodies. “Well, we're not moving that anytime soon.”

“Shame. It might actually have the horsepower to climb this thing.” Deck knelt, flipping one of the now-unconscious men over and patting him down expertly, and Luke frowned at his wince as he flexed his arm.

“Seriously, Deck, how badly are you torn up?” Deck's tactical gear was full coverage, and Luke had no idea how he moved in it at all never mind moved at the speeds he did, but he did know that it made it damn hard to assess the man for damage.

“Not enough to slow me down so don't worry that pinhead of yours about it.”

Dropping a building on him had barely slowed him down so that was less reassuring than it could have been, and Luke flipped him off on principle and made a mental note to get a better look at that arm himself tonight. Or sooner if possible, but considering that they were going to be hiking from here on out he didn't figure that his odds were good. Luke did a search of the flipped truck while Deck finished patting down this latest wave of idiots, but he didn't find much of interest. A couple more bottles of water and a few of the local version of snack bars, but that was about it for anything worth adding to their loads. “What have you got?” he asked, pulling himself back out. And checking the lay of the truck just in case, because damn it, if they could just get a wedge under the thing....

“Best armed tradesmen I've seen in a while,” Deck said with a scoff, distracting him from his fruitless pursuit.

“What do you mean?” 

He gestured towards a small pile of sidearms, and Luke grimaced as he picked the first up. Not the best quality he'd ever seen, and he wouldn't choose it over his revolver as long as he had that choice, but still serviceable enough. Good thing those men had underestimated he and Deck; the two of them could still have taken the lot if they'd been drawn on on approach, but it would have been ugly. Deck tossed a speed loader and a couple more knives onto the pile, and then he joined Luke and they silently split the weapons between them. They couldn't afford to leave them behind with people who were willing to use them, and in a firefight the extra bullets couldn't hurt. Worst case they'd dump them later.

They doubled back after that, grabbing their packs out of the vehicle they'd been forced to abandon at at the sight of the the truck overturned ahead of them on the road and disabling that as well, and then they were off into the brush. It was rough going, boulders and old growth and that damn slippery mud that apparently was due to recent rain, and it wasn't made any easier by the fact that Deck was most definitely favoring one arm. It didn't matter much when they were walking, but when they were scrambling up rock faces....

Luke reached down, grabbing him by the back of his pack and hauling him up over the last ledge and back onto flat ground before looking up at the sky. Where the sun had somehow sunk far too close to the horizon for his comfort, especially since the two of them still hadn't even crested the ridge. “Maybe we ought to get back on the road. Switchbacks or not, I think we'll still make better time than we will if we keep trying to fight through this mess.”

“Awful lot of ambush points along those switchbacks,” Deck pointed out, but it didn't seem to be an actual objection as he turned east and began to pick his way back towards the road they'd left.

“Good thing we're armed, then.”

They ended up pausing at the edge of the road—or the edge of the ledge above the road, anyway, it was a good eight foot drop before they'd be on the packed surface again—for a quick snack and some water, and Luke frowned as Deck winced again. “Can I please take a look at that arm?”

Deck paused mid-bite to shoot him a dirty look. “Nothing to look at.”

“Uh-huh, and that's why you're grimacing every time you bend your elbow.”

“I've had worse.”

“I've given you worse. It's not an advertisement.” He finished a second protein bar and then fished around in his pack for the first aid kit. “Come on, what's the harm? We use up some more of the first aid stuff and I have less to cart around. Could take that rifle kit off your hands.” It was by far the most unwieldy thing that either of them was carrying, even broken down, and Luke would have suggested leaving it behind hours ago if it had been the kind of thing that either of them had been inclined to leave in the hands of anyone pursuing them. He was still going to suggest it if they found a stream or a muddy rut deep enough to guarantee that it would be rendered useless before it was found.

“I can take care of myself,” Deck snapped, eyes narrowing.

“Obviously.” He _didn't_, but Luke would never claim that he _couldn't_. “What's that got to do with anything? Look, we've got a good spot here for a break.” Clear sight lines to the road below, high enough that even a truck driver wouldn't be able to easily spot them, and although the road had to double back above them, the brush that had been slowing their progress so badly was more than thick enough to provide decent cover, especially when they weren't moving around much. “Why not take an extra couple minutes and make sure that things haven't gotten worse? It's not like we can call in an airlift if it turns out you've picked up something fun and flesh-eating.” They weren't risking any calls right now, especially from this nowhere stretch where any signal could be traced. And doubly so since they still didn't know what, if anything, had happened to Mr. Nobody's minion.

Deck started to snap something else but cut himself off almost immediately with a growl. “Fine.”

It was acceptance, however ungracious, and Luke shifted over beside him. Removing his tactical gear was clearly a painful process, whatever Deck had to say about it, and Luke hissed at the sight of the bandages wrapped down his arm. There had been spots of blood coming through before, but if Deck had thought that the pressure bandage would be enough to stop it he'd been dead wrong. From the look of things he'd been bleeding all day.

Luke hesitated. Basic first aid said to leave the old bandage in place, to wrap over it with a fresh one until they were somewhere where Deck could get real medical attention. But they had no idea when or where that was going to be, and if it there was more than just bleeding happening under there....

“Easier to cut it off than try to unwrap it,” Deck said, obviously coming to the same conclusion.

A few minutes with a sharp knife did the job, and Luke grimaced again as the bandage came free. There was no sign of any shrapnel from the door, at least, and no indication of any sort of infection, but there were plenty of burn marks scattered among the torn skin. “Shit, Deck.”

“They blew the damn door straight into my arm, what were you expecting?”

He didn't bother to dignify that with a response, doing his best to clean away the blood without causing further damage. Or more pain, although he had a feeling that that was a lost cause. Most of the blood was coming from four or five deep gashes, a couple of which....

“Bugger it,” Deck said with a sigh, digging for his own first aid kit with his free hand. “I didn't think they were that bad.”

He pulled out a needle and thread, and since the options were clearly Luke stitching up his arm or watching him do it himself, Luke sighed and reached for the needle.

Deck pulled it away immediately. “Oi, like I'm letting you stick anything into me!”

“So you're going to somehow stitch yourself up one-handed?” Luke scoffed. Not that he doubted that Deck could do that too, but it was pretty damn stupid for him to try forcing the issue when Luke was right here. “Besides, I've stuck way more than a needle into you so would you quit being so stubborn?”

That was enough to make Deck choke, although he couldn't exactly deny the statement, and Luke took advantage of his momentary distraction to take the needle from him and move behind him to where Deck could brace his back against Luke's chest.

"Even if it wasn't bad before, I bet fighting the wheel most of the morning didn't help," Luke pointed out. "Are you ready?” There was no way that Deck's response was going to be anything close to polite, so as soon as he started to speak Luke began to stitch. It had to be agonizing, especially interspersed with burns as the cuts were, but Deck didn't make a sound, and Luke did his damnedest to get the job done quickly.

“Done using up all our sunlight on your stitching practice?” Deck asked as Luke finished tying off clean bandages down his arm, and if his voice was tight, Luke pretended not a hear it.

“Oh, you're one to talk. If it was up to you, you'd probably carry a staple gun for days like today.”

“Nothing wrong with a staple gun. You can get a lot done with one.”

He sounded very certain about that, and Luke made a mental note to never check the DSS records for felonies committed with staple guns because he absolutely did not want to know.

Deck shifted away from Luke, pulling his tactical gear back on, and Luke dumped the remains from one water bottle on his hands to clean them before pushing himself to his feet and heading for the edge of the ledge to look down at the road. "Hopefully we can at least make it over the summit by sundown.”

“Afraid of the dark all of a sudden?”

“You're a jackass. If we make it most of the way tonight we can catch a couple hours of sleep and then slip into the city in the middle of whatever counts as rush hour around here instead of showing up at zero-dark-thirty and making it obvious we don't belong.”

“Once again, if one of us wasn't a she-hulk, things like that wouldn't be such a concern.” Deck pulled his pack back on.

“Can't imagine why anyone would bother trying to get you on your knees,” Luke said after a moment, mimicking his actions and then leaping down onto the road. “It's not like you could reach anything from down there.”

“Act like there's something worth reaching.” Deck followed with one of his gymnastics routines that somehow let him land in a rolling tumble that still kept his weight off that arm. “We moving or not, Twinkle-toes?”


	16. Deck:  On the Other Side V

For all that Deck complained when Luke kept him awake with all his twitching and thinking and whatever at inconvenient hours, right now he was the only one still up. Oh, Luke was here, draped half-over him about like usual although this time Deck's injured arm was carefully free, but he was sleeping the deep, even sleep of the obnoxious. Deck kind of wanted to stab him.

Well, he wanted to stab someone. Especially since this time they'd somehow ended up in this position without even having had sex first, and his ridiculous, traitorous body thought that it was very nice and his—_the_, sod it—alpha should stay right where he was.

Just fuck that, and his stupid lizard hindbrain and his inability to sleep right along with it. He'd been perfectly satisfied on his own for his whole bloody life and just because his shite instincts were telling him to bend his neck for Luke didn't mean that he had any intention of doing it.

It wasn't like it had made any difference with Robert and they'd been bloody _married_.

He closed his eyes and tried to will himself to sleep. It shouldn't be this difficult, not given the events of the past forty-eight hours; he could practically feel the exhaustion in every nerve. He and Luke had traded off short naps last night in the brush before heading down into town, but Luke remained absolutely useless when it came to being inconspicuous so it had fallen to Deck to pick up their tickets and a few...well, you couldn't really call them disguises when they weren't much more than changes of clothes, but beggars and choosers and such so they'd made do. In the interests of not arousing any more suspicion he'd booked two tickets through to London with a plan to arrange transportation for Luke back to the States as soon as they got there, but given that it was a commercial flight neither of them had been willing to risk falling asleep on the plane, and then they'd been so damn exhausted and his flat had been so damn close and they'd both wanted a few words with Mr. Nobody anyway....

Besides, it wasn't as if he had any children in the flat to be proper and such around.

Or that his spare room was in any shape for a guest. He'd meant to clean up after Hat had moved back to her own flat, if only because Mum was bound to show up eventually and he didn't even want to think about her response if presented with a less than pristine place to stay, but he just hadn't quite got around to it.

So left the messages they'd needed to, grabbed showers, and then fallen into bed here—fallen into bed after Luke had fussed about his arm again, but just because it was easier to let someone with two hands fix up the bandages didn't mean that Deck couldn't have done it on his own if he'd needed to—and that should have been the end of it until tomorrow morning. Or tomorrow whenever the hell they woke up, anyway, he hadn't bothered to try straightening the time zones out again yet and doubted that Luke had either. Somehow that wasn't happening, though, and he did not appreciate it.

Luke took a deep breath, shifting a little, and one arm tightened a bit around Deck. “'s wrong, princess, you find a pea or something somewhere?”

“Bite me, you arse.”

“Mm. Not the worst suggestion I've heard recently.”

Lips brushed against Deck's neck lightly, but despite the smirk that Deck was very sure accompanied the comment, Luke showed no inclination to follow up further. Which was actually just fine with Deck considering how tired he was, but still. Arse.

* * *

“Why don't you come with me?”

Deck paused, halfway through arranging a ticket to California. For a Stuart Pidass, of course, with the appropriate nickname on Luke's identification because he deserved that much just on principle. "What?”

Luke shrugged, and if he looked away for a moment his eyes were back on Deck's soon enough. “Why don't you come back to California with me? You know we're headed for Bolivia as soon as you or Mr. Nobody track down whatever the link is between there and our last set of new friends so why not get yourself into the right time zone first? Or closer to it than London is, anyway.” He shrugged again. “The spare room's all yours if you want it; you can call it a vacation.”

“Right, and give mini-Hobbs another chance at my head. She probably has tripwires layered all over that spare room by now.”

“She's not planning—there are no tripwires in my house,” Luke said with a groan. “Anyway, she stays at Lisa's when I'm not in town.”

“Oh, great, so I can look forward to tripwires and garrotes. Now I feel so much better.”

“You're a whole new _level_ of paranoid, you know that?” He shook his head. “If I stipulate that none of my relatives will attempt murder, given that they're my relatives and not yours, is there any reason that you need to be here to do the hacking you've got planned? I mean, I know I don't have anything like the computer setup you do, but I've got a perfectly good internet connection.”

He didn't need his full setup for most of what he did, just a decent laptop, and if Deck did decide to get ugly about the whole situation—which, admittedly, he would if Mr. Nobody didn't pop up with some results soon—he wouldn't be using a traceable internet connection anyway.

And it probably wouldn't even come to that. Mr. Nobody's minion had been intercepted and from what little the man had said hadn't been so skilled as Luke and Deck at getting away, and he was less than pleased to say the least. Deck had no doubt that there were strings getting pulled now that he could work for another lifetime and not be able to match. One shoulder twitched.

“Come on,” Luke urged. “If you come to California you might actually get a chance to see the sun again this month.”

“And just what's wrong with a bit of cloud on a nice cool day?”

“You mean when it's a single gray cloud that fills the whole sky and occasionally opens up to dump a bucket of water on your head?” He scoffed. “I almost didn't need the shower after that mess leaving the airport.”

“I'm just impressed that that pinhead of yours managed to get hit by a full bucket.”

“Unlike you who probably didn't even notice since you're such a skinny bastard that you just walk between the raindrops.” He tossed a pillow in Deck's general direction. “This weather is awful, and you know it.”

It really wasn't the best time of year to be in London, not that Deck was going to admit that out loud to an obnoxious Yank bastard, and it wasn't as if Luke was wrong that they'd probably be headed for Bolivia shortly. If not for a meet-greet-bury with the mastermind of this mess then at least to clean up whatever offshoot brand of lunatics was based there. And when that happened he would be on the short end of the stick when it came to jet lag, especially since there was rarely a lot of time to spend acclimatizing once they were both on the ground.

“Come on,” Luke said again, apparently sensing victory. For whatever reason he'd decided that dragging Deck across an ocean with him meant victory. “I'll even find you someone under the age of seventy that you can beat up at my gym.”

From what Deck had seen all he'd have to do was walk into that gym as a beta and he'd have plenty of willing contenders, but he didn't bother to point that out. “Because I didn't kick your arse badly enough last time? Probably ought to count myself lucky that your neighbors didn't call in the bobbies to protect you when I was knocking you around your garden, now that I think about it.”

“Oh, please, it's more likely they'd have called the police to come save the missing member of the Lollipop Guild.”


	17. Lisa: On the Other Side VI (Interlude)

Lisa smiled as she let herself into Luke's house, three bags of groceries in her free hand. Not that he wasn't a grown man perfectly capable of shopping for himself and all of that, but he was also her little brother, and he'd once again been sent off with barely as much as a by your leave. The least she could do was make sure that he had some food waiting for him when he got back.

“Luke, it's me!” she called as she let the door swing shut behind her. Judging by his last text she'd probably beaten him here by several hours, but it didn't hurt to be safe. Sneaking up on him was never a good idea even when he wasn't fresh from what was, of course, absolutely not any kind of government mission.

There was no response from the quiet house, no surprise there, and she was just starting to load up the refrigerator when a flicker of motion through the window caught her eye. She turned with a frown because Sam was in class—as much as she wanted to be home to meet her father, if they let her take a day off school every time he had to go out of town she'd be the oldest elementary graduate in history—and Luke would never leave the yard unlocked.

Movement again, and she pushed aside the curtain and relaxed as she recognized Luke. Until he rocked back abruptly and she realized that he'd just caught an elbow in the face, anyway.

She saw Shaw a moment later as her brother stumbled clear of him and was grabbing for her phone to call the police when Luke recovered, lashing out with roundhouse punch, and there was no mistaking Shaw's grin as he danced out of range.

Luke was grinning too when he came around, and at that point she wasn't sure who she should call. A psychiatrist might not be a bad choice.

Shaw's eyes narrowed as he darted back in, and Luke blocked the first two punches, but the third landed and a kick to the back of one knee made him lurch awkwardly.

Lisa found herself tensing again. She could count on her fingers the number of times she'd seen Luke fight—well, the number of times she'd seen Luke fight since he'd been a confused, angry teenager back on Samoa, anyway—and still have several to spare. It wasn't that she doubted that he could, but his presence alone tended to be a deterrent to that sort of thing. And Shaw...he'd certainly dealt with Chloe's ex and the man's friends easily enough, and none of them had been that much smaller than Luke. Without Luke's training, granted, but she'd gotten the impression that Shaw had been more annoyed by the whole thing than anything else, and not just because of the recording.

Luke attacked next and only one of his punches got through, but the size difference between them was suddenly much more obvious as Shaw hit the ground. And rolled through it and came back to his feet almost instantly, but even if he was landing more blows than Luke they obviously weren't doing an equivalent amount of damage.

Then again, it was entirely possible that there was no damage happening on anyone's part right now because Luke was facing the window again and despite what she'd seen Shaw do before, his nose wasn't even bleeding.

Shaw stepped forward, and somehow this time it didn't look so much like an attack, but—

Luke's expression changed abruptly, and Lisa found herself staring in horror because there was no way that her little brother had just _licked his lips_.

Shaw took another swaggering step, and Luke's hands closed on his waist, and she jumped away from the window and let the curtain fall.

No.

Absolutely not.

It didn't even make _sense_.

Luke had never made any secret of his preferences even if they weren't typical for an alpha: he liked other alphas, generally alpha women who were confident and attractive, and if he didn't tend to be too specific about things like age or race, the ones she'd met had been universally tall and leggy.

Shaw was none of that except maybe the confident part.

Okay, maybe she had seen Luke glance at another man once or twice, but again, alphas, and to her knowledge it had never gone anywhere. And she _knew_ she'd never seen him with an omega. Obviously he would never do anything to make any of the victims at the shelter feel uncomfortable in his presence, but she'd still seen plenty of volunteers over the years pay him...well, call it special attention when he came around, and his response had never once been anything other than polite disinterest.

And none of that was even relevant anyway because Shaw had tried to kill him and her brother could not be that _stupid._

The door burst open and she shrieked, and if her reason wasn't so much surprise but because even if she couldn't quite tell whose tongue was in whose mouth Luke's hand was definitely on Shaw's ass, they didn't need to know that.

They separated instantly, Luke snapping into a guard position and Shaw producing a wicked-looking blade just shy of what she'd call a machete from she didn't even want to know where, and she froze instinctively.

“Lisa?” Luke asked, recovering first and immediately dropping into a more relaxed posture even as he flushed and cleared his throat. “Uh, what are you doing here? I mean, not that it's not great to see you and everything, but I wasn't expecting....”

“It's my lunch hour, and I was just bringing by some groceries,” she said, gesturing vaguely at the still-open fridge and then reaching out automatically to close it. “I didn't think you'd be back for at least a couple more hours.” And she sure as hell hadn't thought he'd be bringing Shaw with him, never mind that they'd been—God, she was _never_ going to get that image out of her head.

He shrugged awkwardly. “We got standby seats on an earlier flight.”

Of course they had. “Can I speak to you? Alone, please.”

“Uh, sure. Deck, do you mind?”

“Yeah. Just give a shout when you're ready to go.”

The not-quite-machete had disappeared again somehow, and he had the sense not to do more than nod slightly in Lisa's direction before heading down the hallway towards she very much hoped the guest bedroom.

She rounded back on her little brother as soon as he was out of sight. “Are you sleeping with him?” If he wasn't he would be soon judging by what she'd just seen, but she wanted to hear it from Luke.

“Well...not all the time.”

“Not all the—Luke, he tried to kill you!”

“Just the once!”

“Once is plenty, how are you not seeing this?” Had this been a thing the last time Shaw was here? She hadn't seen it, but right now she wasn't sure—

“Lise, come on, give him a chance,” Luke said. “Okay, yeah, he tried to kill me, but I put him in prison too.”

'Lise, come on,' the phrase that never heralded anything good from her little brother. Any of her little brothers, really. “That's what's supposed to happen to people who try to commit murder,” she pointed out.

“But we've been working together for a while now,” he continued as if she hadn't spoken, “and we make a good team. He helped us out before didn't, he?”

Something in his expression was enough to make her pause. “Oh, hell. It's serious, isn't it?”

He rubbed his neck, suddenly looking at her forehead instead of meeting her eyes. “No. No, of course not.”

Her hands went to her hips, as much a reflex as anything else. “Luke Hobbs, don't you dare try to lie to me. You weren't good at it when you were little, and you aren't good at it now. Now, you look at me and tell me if this is serious?”

Awkward shrug. “I don't know. Maybe?”

“Well, that clarifies things. Does he know that_ you're_ serious, at least?” Not to mention clearly certifiable and very likely going to get hurt by this whole mess if she was any judge.

“Please, just give him a chance? If it makes you feel any better, I'm pretty sure his brother hates me at least as much as you hate him, although Hattie and I get along fine.”

Hattie being Shaw's sister from what Mama and Jonah and the other boys had told her. And also some kind of super-spy-secret-agent-whatever so God only knew what this mysterious brother was like. “It does not.”

“Please?” Luke repeated. “He helped us out, didn't he?”

She gritted her teeth. 'Us' meant her in this particular instance, and it was technically true, even if she didn't like it. Although.... She frowned in the direction that Shaw had gone, because he'd passed not five feet from her and he hadn't even registered to her senses.

“What?”

“He's an omega.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I couldn't tell.” And she didn't recall that having been an issue the last time he was here.

“Blockers. There aren't exactly a lot of omegas in our line of work.”

Right. Obviously. “Are there any? Other than him?”

“Not that I know of. There aren't even that many betas.” He sighed. “Look, Lisa, I'm not asking for you to become best friends with him or anything like that. Just give him a chance. Trial basis or whatever.”

She sighed. “Fine. But you're explaining this to your daughter, and I suggest that you do it before she sees you two trying for each others' tonsils.”

“Lisa, come on, you know me better than that.”

“Mmm.” Evidence from barely ten minutes ago would suggest otherwise and never mind that he'd had no reason to suspect that she might drop by, but far be it for her to point such a thing out. “And how long will he be in town for for this visit that you seem to be hosting?” Part of her was terrified that it was something like Shaw's heat coming on and that was when things might _become_ serious, but right this moment that was the last thing she wanted to know about.

“Oh, right. So I was actually going to give you a call this afternoon because this isn't really a visit so much as a stopover before we have to go finish cleaning up a few things. I figured that it would be easier for us to wait together, but I doubt that we'll be here for more than a couple days, and I'll need to drop Sam off at your place when we head out again.”

“You know we're always happy to have her, but you're explaining that to her too. And you'd better be back before her school showcase next Friday or you're going to have one unhappy little girl on your hands. You made some promises when you so-called retired, you know.”


	18. Luke:  On the Other Side VII

Something was burning. And he was moving. He wasn't sure of much right now, but those were two very certain facts.

Luke tried to move under his own power, to lift his head to see what was going on, but pain ripped through his head and darkness overtook him again almost immediately.

* * *

Pain brought Luke back to sudden alertness and he rocked back automatically, but the ground beneath him was unsteady—or maybe that was just his legs as it seemed that he'd somehow been stumbling along without being aware of it—and he found himself falling backwards. His descent was abruptly arrested by an arm looped over someone's shoulders, but the pause was only momentary and both he and the person who'd been half-dragging him crashed to the ground. And then there was vicious swearing, or at least he assumed that that's what it although most of the words were garbled nonsense.

It took him a moment to realize that that wasn't just his absolutely guaranteed concussion talking, it was the fact that Deck couldn't swear like a normal person to save his life. Or maybe he just swore like a very English person, what the hell did Luke know?

“'aa 'aa?” he managed to croak. It was supposed to be 'What happened?' but somehow his tongue wasn't cooperating any better than anything else. He couldn't even seem to move his limbs well enough to get out of this inverted turtle position.

“Get off me, you arse,” Deck snapped. “I swear, it's like trying to haul a bloody elephant with four left feet.”

Luke tried to object, but his throat still didn't seem inclined to cooperate, and his hands were clumsy as he tried to figure out where his canteen went.

The uncomfortable thing he'd landed half on top of—Deck, apparently—squirmed free, and then he was pushed up into a sitting position, and a canteen was placed at his mouth. He was able to get enough water to sooth his throat before it was removed again, and then he blinked a few times.

"Hey." Something snapped in the general vicinity of his face, and after a few moments he was able to focus on Deck. Well, technically, two of Deck. Whatever. Close enough.

His partner didn't look very happy, although with Deck that wasn't really an unusual state of being, and after a moment Luke licked his lips and tried again. “What happened?”

“What do you remember?” Deck countered.

Luke flipped him off just on principle, or at least that was what he tried for although his hands still felt awkward, and Deck scoffed.

“I know you're an idiot, I want to know what else you remember.”

Ass. “Nobody got us a military flight in,” he said slowly, trying to organize his thoughts, “and we hit the ground running. Found out when we got up into the mountains that they'd split the camp....” He frowned as his head throbbed. “Three. Fuck.”

“Pretty much.”

Luke swiped at his eyes and then pretended that he didn't miss. What exactly had happened after that he still couldn't quite remember, but three camps would have been a problem no matter what. One they could have handled like before, two would have been trickier but as long as they hit them in tandem...it was more risk, sure, but neither of them would have considered it unreasonable. It'd actually be kind of fun to see who could clear a camp faster some day. But three? No matter how they split it, those odds went the wrong direction fast. “Someone got word out?” he guessed.

Deck—both of him—made a throwaway gesture. “That or a checkin went unanswered. I suppose that we ought to be glad that the fanatics in group three decided that they were willing to put up a fight rather than just blowing everyone involved off the face of the earth.”

“Not group two?”

“They were down by then. Probably just as well seeing as that was the arsenal, although the bunkhouse had about twice as many men, so....” Another pair of vague handwaves.

Luke reached up a hand to press his palm to his forehead, this time connecting harder than he meant to, and another groan escaped despite himself. “I assume at some point one of them changed his mind and that's why I've got a brass band marching through my skull?”

“That or you went arse over teakettle into one of those panic buttons.”

His brains weren't that scrambled, thanks. “More likely you ran face first into a tripwire they set too low.”

The Decks rolled their eyes. “Enough lounging around. Get up, we need to get moving.”

Luke's first inclination was to object, but Deck wouldn't be making him move when injured—and he was most definitely injured—without a damn good reason. He pushed himself to his feet as best he could and Deck ducked back under his arm, and Luke hissed when he realized that not only was Deck's arm bloody again, his shirt was pretty bloody as well and some of that blood was still wet. “You're hurt too.”

“Just scratches. Come on.”

There was something else, though, something tickling on the edge of Luke's consciousness, and before he knew what he was doing he was openly scenting Deck.

“Get—” Deck somehow managed to interrupt one snarl with another even more vicious snarl, but miraculously he didn't slip a knife between Luke's ribs or even kick him to the ground. Which he could have done just by shrugging Luke's arm off right now.

“Why are...how long...?” Luke wasn't quite sure what he was asking, but considering that Deck had managed to hide what he was for twenty-plus years, there was no way that he'd suddenly ended up without his supplies twice in such a short amount of time no matter what had exploded. But whatever else was wrong with Luke's head, he was damn sure that Deck's blockers were wearing off and his omega markers were starting to show.

He kind of liked it.

Even with scrambled brains he knew better than to say that out loud.

“These mountains are popular with through hikers,” Deck said through obviously-gritted teeth. “Two men with military bearing turning up in a remote village is bound to raise some questions, maybe ugly ones depending on how integrated those arseholes were with the locals. If we just happened to be hiking down the range, though, and got caught in a rockslide....” A shoulder twitched under Luke's arm. "We're a little off peak season, but not by enough to matter."

And that was a cover story that would be a lot easier to pull off if they were an alpha and an omega and not an alpha and a beta, Luke recognized easily enough. After all, omegas weren't fighters. “No luck getting through to Mr. Nobody?” he checked.

“Oh, sure, and we had a lovely chat, but I decided that it'd be more fun to wander down a mountain with my partner and his dented skull than be evacuated. Dumbarse.”

Luke pinched his shoulder, mostly because it was the only thing that he was steady enough to do. In retrospect it had been a stupid question, but he had a concussion, damn it.

“My phone got smashed and yours must have been lost in the explosion,” Deck said, ignoring the action. “I still have the emergency beacon, but so far no response.”

“Figures.” Another rock turned under his foot, and although it seemed like he was in a better position to recover this time, he couldn't stop a sharp movement that echoed its way up to his head. His mouth was suddenly full of the water he'd just swallowed, and he gagged and leaned forward to spit it out.

The arm Deck had wrapped around his back tightened. “Just keep walking. We should be down in the foothills by morning.”

“How many of them are following us, and how close? What have we got for weapons?” Deck wouldn't be pushing them like this if he wasn't worrying.

“I clocked four men who made it out for certain, but one had a knife in his back so I'm not sure if he's still on us."

One of Deck's victims, then, and he didn't miss his targets very often. And three wasn't so bad; on a good day either one of them would have taken on the lot of them with a laugh.

Granted, today didn't really feel like a good day.

“There's a chance more made it out the back, though," Deck continued, "and there were dogs the camps. They didn't raise a fuss about us until the fighting started so they weren't the guard sort, but whether they were something else....”

Luke winced. The possibility of tracking dogs did put an ugly spin on things because there was no way they could avoid leaving a trail right now. No wonder Deck wanted to get them into a village where the scents would get muddled. And not that villages didn't raise potential problems of an entirely different sort, especially little ones, but under the circumstances there weren't a lot of other options. “Weapons?” he repeated, because one of those other options was making a stand somewhere. He felt like crap, but prone he was pretty damn sure that he'd still be able to fire a weapon. With the right armament they could pick off anyone who came after them as long as they found a decent place to make a stand.

“You've got your hand cannon, but there's a whole two bullets left so don't go wasting them.”

Damn. If his targets kept dividing in two the way that Deck did, he'd need both bullets just for one of them. Not a great start.

“I've got a knife.”

Luke waited for the 'and,' and when he didn't get one he winced again. Deck was damn good with a blade, and being Deck he never had problems turning random objects into weapons, but considering the arsenal they'd left the helicopter with...well, at the very least two bullets and a knife made making a stand damn near impossible. “I guess hikers wouldn't exactly be armed to the teeth,” he said with a sigh. “And we can claim that we lost our packs in the rockslide, too.” As far as cover stories went, he'd heard worse. Once or twice he'd used worse.

“Making us the most incompetent hikers known to man,” Deck muttered.

“Hey, at least you can blame me,” Luke tried to joke. Deck tilted his head back, eyes flashing, and Luke wished that he'd kept his mouth shut because rattled brains or not he really should have known better. Deck was already injured—and he was, no matter what he was willing to admit—and on edge. There was no way that he'd be happy about letting any kind of weakness show, not even to feign something as silly as having let someone else pick his path. Possibly especially so while he was passing as an omega. Or admitting to being an omega, rather. Luke assumed his competence, but others might not, and even if that would make their cover story easier it wasn't the kind of thing that would sit well with him.


	19. Deck:  On the Other Side VIII

Deck kept his shoulders lowered and a vaguely pleasant expression plastered on his face as he headed down the street towards the general store. Luke was still spending most of his time asleep, reasonable given what he was recovering from, but it left Deck with little else to but wait and occasionally pace the streets hoping for a response to his message. And given that he was openly showing omega markers, he couldn't even pace as much as he'd like. Or he _could_, but there was every possibility that he'd lose his temper and wipe the floor with a couple arseholes who were only being polite by the standards of their culture, and that wouldn't do much for his and Luke's cover story.

He'd come to the conclusion shortly after their arrival that the emergency beacon had to have been damaged even if it didn't look it, and given that, he'd used the landline in the general store to leave a message. Unfortunately since it was a landline and unsecured and all of that the message he'd sent had gone to a dead drop and it would take some time for it to route to someone who could be of use. This was one of the times when it would actually be helpful to be seen as less competent because it had only been three days since they'd arrived in town and four since they'd blown the hell out of that base, and it was probably only now that even a vague question about their whereabouts would cross anyone's mind. And it still wouldn't cause anyone to worry.

Hell, if he'd been on his own they'd be right to be so sanguine; he'd been in situations like this before and turning the hunt back on three-or-four escapees and then through-hiking the damn range until he got to a place large enough to have more escape routes than a twice-weekly bus service was nowhere near out of the question.

Of course, if he'd been on his own this time he might possibly be dead. The building timber that had taken Luke down had been flying directly at Deck before his dumbarse partner had got in the way, and as much as Deck would like to claim that he hadn't needed anyone's bloody help, he'd been tied up dealing with a couple bruisers and hadn't had the maneuvering room to get clear of it in time. And it was just barely possible that a hit heavy enough to crack Luke's thick skull might have dealt someone who weighed two-thirds that much a bit more damage.

Bastard.

One of the local alphas coming the other direction on what passed for the roadside got a bit closer than Deck liked—which, admittedly, wasn't saying much given his mood—and he sidestepped automatically. What he'd like to do was take a swing, just on principle, but there was that bloody cover story to deal with again.

Especially since the guy hadn't actually done anything except walk in his general direction.

The man at the counter of the general store nodded in polite greeting when Deck finally reached the entrance, not really a surprise considering that Deck had visited here every day since their arrival, but when Deck made his carefully-garbled request in Spanish for any messages the man shook his head.

Damn it. Not that Deck was entirely sure in what form their relief would come, but for once he wouldn't object to something obvious. Between them he and Luke had enough local currency for either a decent bribe or to keep them going for a few weeks in rural setting as long as they weren't stupid about it, but neither of those instances assumed a cracked skull for anyone.

He made a show of shopping around for a few grocery items and then headed back to the doctor's house. The doctor wasn't around, just as well given his attitude where Deck was concerned, and Deck greeted his wife politely and offered her the vegetables he'd bought before making his way back to the guest room that also seemed to double as a hospital room for the town.

“Hey,” Luke greeted, eyes opening as soon as Deck stepped in. His voice was hoarse, and Deck poured him a glass of water from the pitcher on the side table.

Luke ignored the water in favor of tugging at Deck's belt as soon as he was within reach, and with that head injury Deck couldn't even risk punching his own bloody partner right now. The arse. Unfortunately it was good cover for a quick chat, and with a scowl he gave into the urging and sank down on the bed beside Luke, ignoring the fact that his ridiculous, traitorous body had no problems melding itself to Luke's side.

“Any word?” Luke breathed quietly as he finally took the water, his other arm slipping around Deck's waist and tapping a second question—surveillance?—against his hip.

Deck gave a minute shake of his head, but when he responded he spoke at a normal level. “This is quite the quiet town we've stumbled into. I lost my Spanish dictionary with my pack," shite and Luke would know it, but it went along with his pretense of a limited knowledge of the language in case anyone was listening, "but if I understood right, we've got another two days before the bus comes through. Just as well since you're taking up the doctor's only bed, I suppose.”

“Yeah, well, not for much longer if I've got any say in it. He's sure you're not hurt too badly?”

“I'm fine.” Not that Deck had any intention of letting that doctor or anyone else around here take more than a cursory look at any of his injuries. Some of them were recent enough to pass muster has having happened in the rock slide, but his arm in particular would not.

“Hm.” Luke being the arsehole that he was, he set his water aside and started fussing at the bandage on Deck's arm almost immediately, and given the lack of fumbling....

“Your vision's managed to sort itself out, then?”

“Yep. Only seeing two of things that I should right now, so like I said, I'll be out of this bed and we'll be back on the road in no time.” He frowned at the once-again-reopened gashes. “You're on antibiotics, right?”

Deck removed his arm from Luke's grasp, and that, at least, Luke had better sense than to fight him about as his hand dropped back to its previous position. “I'm fine.” Deck tightened the bandage back down quickly, and yes, whatever, it was a little more sore than it ought to be, but nothing he couldn't ignore until he was in a secure location.

“So a bus in two days, huh?” Luke asked. “Just one, or do we have options as far as where we're headed? It'd be a shame to have to backtrack.” This time the question tapped into Deck's hip was 'weapons?', and Deck shrugged.

“One bus that comes up here from the city once a week, and they don't have the right supplies for us to restock and keep going from here even if you weren't hurt so I don't think we have much of a choice.” He was actually reasonably certain that there were plenty of weapons in town that they could make use of if pressed, even if their owners only had them for hunting and dealing with threats from the local wildlife, but nothing that he or Luke could purchase. And not that he objected to stealing what they needed but doing it before they were ready to leave was chancy at best when they were the only strangers in town.

“Well, hopefully the doc will okay me for some walking around town, at least,” Luke suggested. 'Hike anyway' took longer than the other two questions, mostly because it wasn't part of their typical vocabulary, but this time Deck nodded. He didn't particularly like it, not with Luke still injured, but even if they did steal weapons those weapons—and this bloody cover—wouldn't mean shite if their targets set up an RPG on a hill above the road. A lone bus was a pretty bloody obvious target, all things considered.

Granted that there was no indication that they were still being hunted, but he'd have been dead a thousand times over by now if he didn't have the sense to be paranoid. There were footsteps at the door before either of them could say anything else, and Luke's hand tightened abruptly as the doctor all but patted Deck on the head when he entered. Not that Luke could have prevented Deck from eviscerating the patronizing bastard if he'd really decided to go for it, but the grip gave Deck an instant to compose himself, and he gritted his teeth and slipped out of range. “I'll be back when he's finished.”

* * *

They were marginally better armed than they had been when they'd arrived in town, a rifle apiece although not much more than a handful of ammunition for each, and Deck had acquired a few new knives although none of them were particularly well balanced for throwing. And his arm was...bothering him. Again. Or still. Just slightly, though, and Luke was moving under his own power so Deck would take it.

“How far is this city?” Luke asked.

“Not far, it's the roads that are shite.”

“Again? Great. What is it with you and walks in the country?”

Deck flipped him off. “There were still no messages for us as of two hours ago and staying here would be just a little obvious. Unless you wanted to get on that bus?” They had debated finding an excuse to stay in town and waiting for the extraction Deck had requested, but leaving for the city was an obvious expectation for someone injured but mobile, and in the end neither of them had been too interested in staying there anyway. 

“And get picked off by a sniper from half a mile away?” Luke scoffed. “Thanks but no thanks.”

They were intentionally leaving at the same time as the bus, just by a slightly different route, and Deck picked up his pace a little. He'd rather be traveling at night, especially given their stolen weaponry, but that didn't work with their circumstances so speed was of the essence.

Luke continued to match Deck's pace, although if the lines around his eyes were anything to go by he was still in quite a bit of pain, but he'd no more admit to that type of thing than Deck would and he gestured to the tree hedge ahead. “Follow above the road ourselves and see if we can pick up that sniper?” he asked when they reached scrub land rough enough to provide some cover.

Deck hesitated. If Luke was a hundred-percent—hell, more than fifty-percent—he'd have jumped on the opportunity. He hated leaving jobs less than fully done. Right now, though.... “Let's see what we run into,” he hedged after a moment. He could take three or four men alone easily enough if it came to that, especially if one was a sniper so busy watching others' backs through his scope that he forgot about his own, so as long as Luke stayed on his feet and capable of basic self-defense it should be fine.


	20. Luke:  On the Other Side IX

Deck dropped to the ground, rotating on one hand to kick out the knee of the last man in the little ambush party and then following up with a second kick that snapped his head back as he fell. Luke hummed cheerfully as Deck flipped back to his feet and advanced on the man he'd dropped on the sniper not thirty seconds before. Watching Deck fight...he was just so _efficient_. All that speed and accuracy and control and just no wasted effort at all.

So pretty.

Shit but he needed to get this head injury under control.

The guy struggling to his feet now was nearly Luke's size, but he'd taken Deck's flying kick right between the shoulder blades and then landed on the would-be sniper and his stand, and both of those things had clearly taken their toll. It was also possible that he was confused about why an omega was about to kick his ass, but Deck wasn't the sort to give his opponents a lot of time to think, and it was pretty obvious that this guy wouldn't have been able to compensate for Deck's fighting style even if he wasn't starting out at a disadvantage.

Going overland down from the village had been much easier once they'd gotten past the fields, enough so for them to get ahead of the rickety old bus trying to navigate narrow switchbacks even when one of them had to be damn careful about moving his head too sharply. And just as well that it had, too, given that they'd come out above these idiots setting up a snipers' nest not three miles from their starting point. Luke hated to stay behind when there was a fight going on just on principal, and never mind that three people weren't a real fight where Deck was concerned, but he wasn't in any kind of shape for hand-to-hand yet and knew it. And he still had those two shots left in his revolver if things somehow took a turn for the ugly. Well, that and the two rifles they'd acquired, but this was exactly the wrong range to go using a rifle at if you weren't planning to club someone with it.

They'd actually debated sniping the lot of them, especially given the fanatical nature of the group and the possibility of suicide vests, but neither rifle had a silencer and gunshots were bound to carry now that they were out in more open land. Better for all involved—well, excepting their targets, obviously—if this was done quietly.

Deck didn't bother going for this one's knee, instead slipping inside his envelope and plowing a fist into his stomach before he realized where Deck had ended up. He followed that that with another full-power kick to his jaw that spun the man around and sent him to the ground. A flailing arm glanced off Deck's as he fell, but there was clearly no intent behind it, and Luke was surprised when Deck doubled forward, one hand going to cradle the forearm that had been struck.

One hand going to cradle his already-injured forearm.

Damn it, Luke had known that something was wrong there. He sighted down his revolver just in case, but the man stayed where he fell, and the would-be sniper was still lying limp where he'd been landed upon as well. And the first one certainly wasn't going to be getting back up.

Deck still hadn't released his arm, and Luke raised his voice slightly. “Deck?”

“It's nothing.”

“Clearly.” Luke stuck his revolver back in his belt and jumped down to join him, forgetting his head injury for one critical moment. Unfortunately it didn't forget him, and he found himself going to his knees upon landing, stomach rolling. It was several minutes before he could get himself back under control, and he spat and swiped at his mouth before pushing himself far more carefully back to his feet.

Deck had moved close while he was indisposed, and Luke took advantage of his distraction to reach out and check his arm. Or to try as Deck did his best to pull away before Luke could do more than get a loose grip on his wrist.

“Come on, knock it off,” Luke said, tugging lightly. “You're the only one of us in any kind of fighting shape so if it needs to be bandaged up better I can—” He sucked in his breath as he touched Deck's sleeve and felt the heat rising from Deck's arm even through his shirt. “Shit, Deck, you don't need a better bandage, you need a doctor. Why didn't you say something?” He'd known that Deck had still be having problems with his arm, but he'd assumed it was just because he'd reopened the older injury and was keeping it hidden because he didn't want the locals getting an eyeful of an something that didn't match their cover story.

Deck's lip curled.

“Deck?”

“I'll find some antibiotics when we get to the city. _After_ these damn blockers kick back in.”

Luke's jaw tightened. He hadn't been conscious for a good portion of their time in the village, and what he had been conscious for had shown...well, it had been a level of patronizing on the doctor's part that had left him surprised that the man still had a throat never mind teeth. But Deck wasn't stupid; if his arm was bad enough that he was talking about antibiotics he should have either forced the issue or stolen some antibiotics back in town. Tiny it might have been, but this was still the twenty-first century and there should have been something available.

“Forget it, I've had worse.” Deck pulled his wrist from Luke's grip. “Now, let's get this done and get moving, we've still got a lot of ground to cover.”

Luke wanted to argue, but it wasn't as if he was wrong. Or, more importantly, as if Luke had anything on him that would be of immediate help. They stripped their would-be attackers of weaponry and made a search for phones and identifying information before leaving, but this time there were none of the latter to be found. Nor did he or Deck have their own phones to take pictures for facial recognition this time, although Luke did his best to commit their faces to memory anyway on the off chance that Mr. Nobody had some files for him to take a look at.

They resumed their downwards trek, and now that he was looking more closely Luke could see that Deck wasn't anywhere near as steady as he was pretending. Damn it. He was still better off than Luke, sure, but that wasn't saying much, and from the way he was keeping that arm close and shielded it almost had to be some kind of infection.

The ancient city bus caught up and passed them not long after they hit the flatlands, but they weren't far from the city by then and given what they were carrying Luke didn't even want to try to flag it down. As it was they had to destroy all the rifles and leave them behind in a muddy pond on the final approach to the city, making sure that his revolver and the pair of handguns that Deck had acquired were out of sight under their shirts at the same time, and as they stepped out onto the first thoroughfare Luke shifted slightly in front of Deck. Deck might snarl at him about it, but the fact was that people were less likely to jostle a big alpha than an omega. Or even a beta, but even if Deck's blockers had mostly kicked in Luke could still smell a distinct trace of his real scent markers. Some of that might just be familiarity, but not all of it.

It was more proof that Deck was in worse shape than he was admitting when he only hissed 'arse' at Luke's back and made no attempt to change their positioning, and Luke scanned the street ahead. There were a couple things he wanted right now: an internet café so his occasionally-criminally-inclined partner could get them tickets back to the States with no need to wait for word from Mr. Nobody, and a drug store so he could get something to help clean up said partner's arm before the situation got any worse. And he wouldn't object to something for his head, either.

He spotted the farmacia sign first and changed course immediately.

“Where are you going?” Deck asked, although he matched Luke's turn. “We need an airport not a chemist's.”

“Chemist's? It's a pharmacy. You'd think someone from England would be able to speak English.”

“Bloody American. How bad is your head?”

The proprietor was too busy ringing up a customer at a desk by the door to pay them any attention when they entered which was just fine with Luke, but from the dark look Deck shot him he figured out Luke's real reason for coming in about two steps past the entrance. Fortunately a stack of cheap t-shirts on a cardboard stand distracted him for whatever reason, and Luke took advantage of the opportunity to find and grab what looked like the best of the antiseptic options. He picked up a couple of rolls of bandages as well, and if leaning down to retrieve them from their spot on the lowest shelf left him more than a little lightheaded, at least he didn't have anything left in his stomach to lose.

By the time he recovered Deck was beside him again, handing him a basket with not only one of the shirts but also a six-pack of water, a bottle of what looked like knockoff Tylenol, and some kind of cell phone already in it, and Luke decided that that qualified as enough for the time being and spent most of the remainder of their cash on the lot of it.

“You taking up souvenir shopping?” he asked as they returned to the street, pulling the shirt out of the bag and tossing it at Deck.

“Wanker. I need to lose the one I'm wearing, it's carrying too much scent.”

Oh. Right. Luke was absolutely blaming the head injury for missing that one. Speaking of which, he decided he'd been right about the bottle of pills Deck had selected, downing a couple of them along with most of one of the bottles of water, and then followed Deck as he ducked down one of the narrow alleys and out of sight of the main crowd.

Deck didn't waste time, handing Luke half a dozen granola bars that he'd very probably just shoplifted and then stripping off the shirt he was wearing and pulling the new one on.

Luke was torn between complaining about the theft, rolling his eyes at the fact that Deck had probably found the one long-sleeved shirt in the entire store, and wanting to rip it right back off because the bandage on his arm didn't look good.

“It's fine,” Deck growled as Luke settled on the most important of the lot, dropping the granola bars into the bag on his arm and reaching for Deck.

“Sure it is. Come on, roll your sleeve up before you start oozing through your new shirt. You don't have your usual dozen layers to hide it right now.”

Deck still didn't seem inclined too cooperate, and Luke sighed.

“You're being ridiculous. This might be a city but it's not a _city_ so I doubt even you'll be able to manage a direct flight back to the US for us, and given everything we don't have on us we'll have to arrange some assistance at Customs anyway. There's no way you're stupid enough to want to sit around waiting another twenty-four hours for a medical check.”

From the expression on Deck's face if he wasn't stupid enough he was absolutely stubborn enough, and Luke groaned.

“Your blockers are in place, and even if they weren't, it's me. Would you just give me your damn arm? I've already got a headache.”


	21. Deck:  On the Other Side X

Knocking in the teeth of the smug arsehole who kept side-eyeing them would not improve the situation, but damn was Deck tempted. Luke had been right about them being unable to arrange a direct flight—damn him and minimum-length runways too—but at least Deck had managed to limit their delay to only a single layover in La Paz before their final flight to LA. Unfortunately now that they were in LA they were dealing with Customs, and while he'd left the appropriate messages for Nobody and company, they hadn't received an immediate response. Which was reasonable enough, if he was being honest, and it wasn't as if he or Luke were in any danger of being hauled off anywhere they didn't want to go. But his head was throbbing, his arm was worse, and this room was bloody cold. And to add insult to injury his partner was somehow slumped down and napping in the chair to Deck's right despite the fact that it was barely any larger than the airplane seats he'd spent the last however many hours bitching about.

The phone on the desk rang, sending a spike of pain through Deck's skull, and for an instant he was actually grateful for the uniformed idiot at the desk because the man picked it up almost immediately. His entire posture changed abruptly at the introduction of whoever was on the other end of the line, and while Deck was a fair lipreader even at this angle, there didn't seem to be much to read except multiple variations on 'Yes, sir.' Since he turned to stare at Deck and Luke with wide eyes upon hanging up Deck took it as a good sign and elbowed Luke.

Luke's 'hm' was more alert than it should have been for someone who'd supposedly been asleep, and Deck shot him a glare.

“And here I thought I needed a nap,” Luke said with a smirk. “Are we free?”

“Just about, I'd say.”

“Good.” He straightened, stretching his back—carefully, Deck noted, because there was no way his head injury had magically healed since he'd gone green on their first takeoff no matter what he was claiming—and then frowned at Deck. “You're pale even for you. And are you shivering?”

“I'm not bloody shivering.” It wasn't his fault that Americans air conditioned everything well beyond the point of sanity.

“Deck, you need a doctor.”

“I do not.”

The smug arsehole in the room who wasn't his partner approached, looking much more respectful, and Deck cut off the rest of what he'd planned to say and rose in unison with Luke.

“You're, uh, you're free to go,” he said, not meeting either of their eyes for more than a moment. “He said to tell you that you'd be contacted for debriefing at a later date. Would you like me to call you a car?”

“We'll catch a taxi, thanks,” Luke said, not bothering to ask who the 'he' in question was.

As far as Deck was concerned taxis only became acceptable means of transport after you tossed out the driver, but he wasn't in any kind of shape for that right now and knew it. Oh, he'd be fine without a doctor no matter what Luke thought, but a few minutes to clean up and some rest in a place where they weren't trying to create an indoor snow globe...yeah, that would be a relief. That was part of the reason that he was taking Luke up on his offer of the spare room for a few days rather than booking himself directly onto yet another flight.

Once they were out into the airport proper it was just as crowded as the last time Deck had come through, and he dropped back to let Luke cut their path to the exit. No point in having a human bulldozer for a partner if you didn't make occasional use of him. Somehow he wasn't moving as smoothly as he should have been, though, his shoes somehow catching oddly on the floor tiles, and as they stepped through a final set of automatic doors he moved left to avoid an older woman fighting an unstable suitcase up onto the curb.

* * *

“Sir? Ah, there you are. Welcome back to the land of the living.”

Easy, peaceful awakenings were for people who didn't have a price on their head, and Deck's right hand shot out to grab the wrist of the smiling blonde leaning over him at the same time that his mind registered the smell of a hospital around him, heavy bindings on his left arm, and beeping sensors.

“Easy,” a familiar voice said, and Deck found his fingers wrapped around a hand that most definitely did not belong to the petite nurse. “I'd say you're fine, but you got taken out by a seven year old with a unicorn purse so you should probably just stay still.”

Luke, of course, now looming next to said nurse, and Deck let his lip curl even as he released his grip and relaxed back into the mattress. “Didn't figure I'd make it into Heaven, but who did I offend to get stuck with your ugly arse?”

Somehow his voice wasn't as strong as he'd have expected, the words catching in a dry throat, and if Luke was grinning it was a grin with a distinct edge to it. “I am an amazing specimen of humanity, and you know it.”

Luke offered Deck a glass of water before he could say anything else, and in the interests of being able to complete future insults he accepted it and ignored the indignity of the straw as he took a careful sip. Coming from Luke he was reasonably certain that he didn't have to worry about drugs—drugs beyond a suspiciously cloudy IV line running into his left hand—but he hadn't survived this long without taking basic precautions, and there were several things about this situation that weren't adding up.

“I'll get the doctor,” the nurse said.

Deck frowned down at his bandaged arm, confirming that it was as heavily encased as he'd suspected, and then removed the IV line.

"It was just antibiotics," Luke said, although he didn't look particularly surprised.

Upon closer examination he looked more tired than anything else, and Deck did a quick survey of the room. Empty except for him and Luke, so small favors there, and since it seemed to be a perfectly normal hospital room he judged a low probability of listening devices. “What happened?” He didn't feel any new bruises so he doubted they'd been attacked no matter what Luke had thrown out about unicorn purses, but the last thing he remembered was following Luke through the airport.

Luke sighed and rubbed his forehead. “You scared the hell out of me, Deck. You were behind me so I didn't actually see it, but one second we were headed for the taxi stand and the next a little girl was screaming and you were passed out on the concrete. I don't know if you bumped her or she bumped you or what, but when the paramedics cut your sleeve away your arm was _massively_ infected.” He shook his head. “I mean, I knew you were in bad shape, but I heard the one on the radio with the hospital say that they might want to be prepared for an amputation.”

For once in his life Deck found himself at a loss for words. It wasn't a shock that his arm had been infected; he wasn't an idiot and had recognized the signs well enough. Old shrapnel, new shrapnel, whatever, something had got stuck in there and his arm hadn't been healing right. But he'd figured that once he was somewhere safe he'd find some more antiseptic, sterilize one of his knives, and get it cleaned up better than Luke had been able to manage in that dusty alley. And after that...well, a series of triple-dose antibiotics took care of most things in the end. None of it would be pleasant, but it wouldn't be the first time he'd had to do something of the sort either. Infected so bad that he'd ended up in hospital with even a mention of amputation, though, that hadn't even occurred to him. “How long have I been out?” he finally asked.

“Almost three days.”

Fucking hell. “What are you doing here?”

“Where else would I be?”

Home with his daughter was the obvious answer, however surprised Luke looked a the question, and Deck stared.

Luke's lip curled. “Jesus, Deck, do you really think I'd leave you here alone?”

Deck glared. “I can take care of myself.”

“Obviously, but no one should have to wake up....” His eyes stayed locked on Deck's for a moment and then he shook his head again and shrugged, looking away. “Forget it. Just assume I've seen what happens to hospitals when you're through with them.”

Drug his little brother up in a black site hospital with all-but-assassins on every floor and you got what you got, but he didn't believe for a second that that had anything to do with Luke's presence. Unfortunately before Deck could say anything else an older man wearing white and carrying a clipboard entered the room with the nurse who'd been here before trailing behind.

“Well, hello there.”

Something about his tone put Deck immediately on edge, and he didn't miss Luke shifting up towards his head.

“Now, I'm sure you're very scared and confused, but I want you to know that you're in the best of hands.”

The IV needle he'd removed would more than suffice to rip this patronizing wanker's jugular open, and Deck had a feeling that Luke knew it too as a heavy hand came to rest on his shoulder.

“We'll just take a nice quick look at your arm, and if you're doing well maybe your partner can take you home in a few days.”

That was enough to halt Deck's plans for murder, or at least readjust his target temporarily, because while Luke was his partner he sure as hell wasn't in the sense that this doctor was implying. He tilted his head back to glare at Luke, who very carefully continued to avoid Deck's eyes, and now that he was paying attention he realized that his omega markers were showing. They would be, of course, after three days with no blockers, but—

“I still don't know how you could possibly have done something so ugly to yourself just tearing out some old garden fencing,” the doctor said, still smiling that ridiculous, patronizing smile. “And then leaving it untreated for so long.”

He actually tutted, and the hand on Deck's shoulder tightened fractionally, but since the doctor was in the process of unwrapping Deck's arm and Deck wanted a look at the damage himself, he let it go. For now. There would be plenty of time for murder in the near future.

When it was finally unbandaged, it didn't look as bad as he'd expected. Not good, but not as awful as it might have considering what Luke had just told him. Although it had apparently had three days to heal since they'd cleaned out whatever the infection had been, as hard as that still was to believe. He waited until the doctor had replaced the bandages and then removed his arm from the man's grasp. "I'm leaving."

“Now, Declan, I don't think you're in a position to make that kind of decision. For now why don't you just lie back and let us—oh, where's your IV line gone? Now you just relax, and we'll pop that right back in.”

Deck turned his hand further inwards. “I said I'm leaving. I'm a fully functional adult, and as last I looked the United States wasn't in the business of kidnapping.” 

“Really, sir.” The doctor looked up at Luke. “Perhaps you can explain that he'll be better off here until he's healed a little more. He might take it better coming from his alpha.”

Deck's jaw tightened. Luke wasn't _his_ bloody anything, and that was leaving aside the fact that 'he' was right here and hadn't suddenly gone deaf in the past two seconds.

“Oh, we're all set up at home,” Luke said with a smile, not releasing Deck's shoulder. “I'll make sure he gets plenty of rest and all that.”

Clearly the doctor had expected Luke to support him and hadn't been ready for that turn of events because his expression went abruptly from patronizing to irritated. “We prefer that our patients stay until we feel they're ready to leave.”

“I don't give a rat's arse what you prefer.” The doctor looked surprised that Deck had spoken, not that Deck particularly cared about that either. He shifted his glare back to Luke who would at least answer him. “Where are my clothes?”

“Most of them are right here, but you're going to have to make do with one of my shirts since they had to cut yours off.”

“Fine.” Luke's definition of 'shirt' wasn't, but if it got him out of here he could deal with it.

The doctor spent a few more minutes trying to convince him and Luke that they were making the wrong decision, although the fact that he spent more time talking to Luke than Deck proved that it was the exact opposite. Eventually he gave up and left, though, sending the nurse off somewhere to find forms, and Deck pushed himself up and grabbed for the clothes Luke wordlessly handed him. He wasn't as steady as he might have liked, the muscles in his back spasming slightly as he forced himself to steady, but he could manage just fine on his own.

“We really do have the guest room set up,” Luke said after a minute. “And no, no tripwires or mines or murder holes or anything else that your paranoid mind might come up with, I promise.”

Deck glared at him again.

“You scared the hell out of me,” Luke repeated.

“So you decided to up and _claim_ me?!”

“Of—how do you not know me better than that?” He turned, pacing a step and then swiveling back to face Deck in the small room. “Damn it, Deck, they assumed that we were together when I got in the ambulance with you, and then when they started talking about how bad things were I didn't know what else to say!”

“Was 'coworker' too many syllables?” Because even if they were maybe a little more than that sometimes, it wasn't any kind of official and sure as hell wasn't something that needed to get blasted out to the world when he didn't have his blockers in place.

“No, but it was pretty obvious that you weren't going to be up and moving before they figured out that you were an omega, and as stupid as it is, you know people are going to ask a lot more questions about an omega alone in the hospital than an alpha or beta. Giving you a next-of-kin right off the bat...it just seemed like the easiest way to handle everything, and given what they'd already assumed there was no reason for it not to be me.”

“You didn't think about crushing up a couple of pills and dumping them down my throat when no one was looking?”

“You carry an unlabeled bottle of at least three different kinds of pills and you've never exactly filled me in on your routine so no, of course I wasn't going to start randomly dosing you when the doctors were already pumping you full of who knows what else to try and combat the mess in your arm. The nurse was rotating IV bags every two hours that first day.”

That was...not completely unreasonable. Damn it. This wasn't the first time he'd wished that his usual blockers stayed in his system for longer than they did, but the long-term versions all had nasty enough side affects that even he didn't risk them unless he was desperate.

“I did try calling Hattie,” Luke continued. “I'm not an idiot, and I know you'd be happier with a sister than...." Another quick shrug. "But she's apparently off doing something classified and I haven't heard back from her.”

“She wouldn't know either,” Deck admitted. She might have before Eteon had happened—Eteon the first time around—but a lot had changed since then.

Luke sighed. “Come on, let's just get you signed out and be gone. They don't know your real name, my real name, any of that so it's not like anything is going to trace back to us.”

“Right, because it's not like our faces were plastered all over the international news networks not so long ago.” Of course most people probably had forgotten about that by now, people being people and memories being what they were. But names weren't his primary concern even if Luke had apparently decided to give him bloody Declan as an alias. “Does he know?”

Luke looked away again. “Maybe? I haven't heard anything, not even a ping for debriefing which makes me think probably, but who knows what's been happening while we've been away.”

Damn it. There was no way that this was going to end any way but badly—badly aside from the fact that his partner had apparently already decided that claiming him was somehow an acceptable thing to do—and there wasn't a single thing he could do about it. He gritted his teeth and finished dressing, pretending that his legs didn't waver as he forced himself to stand and grabbing the shirt last. He'd have appreciated the sleeves more if the bottom quarter of them hadn't hung past his wrists, but it did fit over the new bandage on his arm and Luke had the sense to keep his mouth shut. “Let's go.” The sooner he got to Luke's place the sooner he could get on a computer and get himself back home.


End file.
